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Deucalion Review[/SIZE]
Ships began arriving in Deucalion throughout late June to prepare for the start of the race, scheduled for July 1st. Visiting crowds toured the ships, with the two hometown favorites, the
Alala and the massive
Atlantes, gaining the largest number of visitors. The Japanese
Yabanjin, as always, proved to be the other crowd-pleaser.
On June 29th, the Atlantean royal family made their appearance and hosted a dinner for the ship captains and senior officers at the palacial Hotel Deucalion, then spent all of June 30th making courtesy calls to many of the ships. Although they were unable to visit all thirty-six of the ships, the Atlantean royals did their best, although their schedule was interrupted when five-year old Princess Electra, granddaughter of King Oberoth, disappeared while aboard the barque
British Steel. A frantic search revealed that she had wandered into the ship's galley, where the peg-legged cook found her giving close investigation to the captain's stash of Jamaica rum.
With the first Tall Ships Challenge, the ceremonial flagship was again the Irish-flagged
High Adventure, one of the largest sailing ships in the world. The race, in fact, would pit some of the largest remaining sailing ships in the world against each other. The five-masted
Atlantes remained the largest commercial sailing ship ever built, rivaled in size only by the five-masted
High Adventure. Three "Flying P-liners" were represented by the British
Prince of Wales (ex-
Peking), the German
Padua, and the Chilean
Esmeralda (ex-
Pamir). The Argentines, who had won the 1938 Tall Ships Race with their
Presidente Sarmiento, were represented for this race by the borrowed Chilean
Almirante Uribe while the
Sarmiento was being refitted. Other three-masters - the twin French barques
Étoile and
Belle Poule, the
Danmark, the Polish
Dar Pomorza, and a number of other ships rounded out the major contestants. Three vintage frigates, the Canadian
Shannon, the British
Trincomalee, and the Atlantean
Alala, which anchored in line-ahead formation for the period of the review, recalled the days of Fighting Sail, and the contestants all agreed that the recently-refitted USS
Constitution would have made a spectacular addition to this illustrious company. Smaller schooners, brigs, and barques added to the racers.
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Rules[/SIZE]
The Tall Ships Committee had used the previous two races as opportunities to refine the rules for the first Tall Ships Challenge. Unlike the shorter Tall Ships Races, the Challenge would be a long-distance endurance race over some 1,500 nautical miles of open ocean. Each of the ships would carry three volunteer observers who would mark the ship's time, from the starting buoys in Deucalion to the ending buoys at Halifax. This would permit the contestants to leave Deucalion whenever they felt ready to do so.
As the first honorary flagship of the Tall Ships Challenge, the
High Adventure (who's owners were partial sponsors of the event) was automatically disqualified from winning the race.
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Race Leg One[/SIZE]
Overnight before the start of the race, the weather off Deucalion turned ugly, and weather reports from the Atlantean Navy and merchant ships in tracks to the northwest of Deucalion reported gale-force winds driving a land breeze. After some hurried discussion aboard the
High Adventure, the race committee elected to delay the race by twenty-four hours, as none of the captains were confident they could beat into the sixty-knot winds blowing directly towards the harbor mouth. By July 2nd, however, these winds had not moderated, resulting in another delay.
In the wee hours of July 3rd, the wind abruptly shifted and slowed to thirty knots, as the masters of the
Alala and the
Atlantes had been predicting for the past two days. Using their knowledge of local conditions, the two Atlantean captains moved their ships towards the harbor mouth on the evening of July 2nd, and when the race committee did not extend the weather-alert, the two ships promptly slipped out of the harbor. The rest of the fleet quickly got underway, but the wind continued dropping, meaning that by the time
Danmark and
Padua passed the race-start buoys and started their clocks, the two Atlantean ships were already out of sight. This started a general exodus from Deucalion, with the three "Flying P-liners" forming into a pack, together with
Dar Pomorza and
Llanero.
The weather continued to dog the ships for the rest of the voyage to Bermuda, and the pack of P-liners quickly broke up as each of the ships sought their most advantageous points of sailing. The square-rigged ships, however, found much easier going than those rigged fore-and-aft, which could not carry as much sail and were discomfited by the cross sea.
High Adventure lagged at the tail end of the ships; as a cruise ship, she was actually carrying paying passengers for the race, and her captain, unconcerned about winning, reduced sail to ease her seakeeping. The
Atlantes continued cracking on at the head of the formation until, shortly after midnight on the third, she was overtaken (and nearly rammed) by
Juan Sebastian de Elcano in a patch of heavy rain. Shortly before evening on July 5th, the Argentines in
Almirante Uribe inched past the big five-masted barque and beat her into Bermuda.
Among the smaller ships, the storm made progress difficult. The modern
British Steel was an exception: her crew of Sea Cadets found that despite the awkward cross-seas, the
Steel had been ballasted almost perfectly for the conditions, and her masts and rigging seemed unstrained even by the heaviest load of canvas. Her skipper, a tough septuagenarian who'd learned his sailing trade from the legendary Richard Woodget of the
Cutty Sark, pressed his ship and crew hard and was rewarded by logging the second-fastest average speed on the first leg of the race, beating all of the larger square-riggers in all categories.
The only ship to make a faster run was the American schooner
Atlantic. The Americans, in hot rivalry with the Canadian
Bluenose, signaled their intentions by raising a hand-sewn flag stating "Through Hell or High Water" and pressed on an almost irresponsible quantity of sail. Their gamble paid off as the
Atlantic logged a passage of sixty hours and thirty-two minutes from Deucalion to Bermuda - an average speed of 14.47 knots.
The Class C vessels, all small schooners, did quite badly in the ocean conditions, although they all pushed hard. The Bulgarian
Topaz was first to reach Bermuda. The ship had been smashed by a rogue wave just short of Bermuda: her skylight and two portholes were broken and her lifeboats carried over the side. She was followed into Bermuda by the Atlantean
Flamme and the Peruvian
Conquistador, both having suffered from the weather as well.
The last ship into Bermuda was the
Yabanjin. Due in large part to her small size and historically-correct design, she had made a slow passage simply to survive the heavy seas.
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Bermuda Review[/SIZE]
Each of the ships was required to stay in Bermuda at least twenty-four hours, with their officially-logged time restarting when they passed the buoys at the entrance to Bermuda harbor. The population of the island was welcoming, but the weather stayed uncertain; and many of the ships elected to wait in harbor for much longer than the required twenty-four hours.
Alala and
Trincomalee were among the ships electing to stay an extra day, and they used that time to stage their now-traditional mock-battle. The Bulgarian
Topaz spent a full six days anchored in Bermuda repairing the damage from the rogue wave, while the Chileans in
Esmeralda were delayed as they shifted ballast and sent one of their sailors ashore for an emergency appendectomy. The
Prince of Wales found herself an extremely popular ship due to the novelty of one of her onboard instructors, Stan Hugill, "the last working shantyman."
Another tradition, originating from the first Tall Ships Race, was the exchange of crew members between ships. The Chileans from
Esmeralda, drawing lots from a hat, were amused when they swapped fifteen cadets with the Argentines, who were borrowing the Chilean
Almirante Uribe. The
Llanero and the
Juan Sebastian de Elcano, both four-masted schooners, traded cadets, as did the
Padua and
Balgarski Lav.
The weather appeared to abate and many of the ships raised anchor and sailed for Halifax.
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Race Leg Two[/SIZE]
The first ship to leave Bermuda was the American
Atlantic, which hoped to use the moderating weather to maintain her long lead over rival
Bluenose. The
Elcano followed her to sea ten hours later.
Padua,
Prince of Wales,
Esmeralda Danmark, and
Atlantes sailed within an hour of each other, with the rest of the ships leaving in a trickle of ones and twos. The Brazilian sail-training ship
Benjamin Constant found an erstwhile partner and opponent in the Chinese
Fu Chi, and the Brazilians, having been last in all previous Tall Ships races, were delighted to be out-sailing the Chinese; they felt certain their ship had been cursed to lose the races, and were positive that this time would be different. They had established a five-hour lead over the
Fu Chi coming into Bermuda, and hoped to maintain it en route to Halifax.
As the trailing ships put out to sea, Bermudan radios picked up wireless transmissions from the American steamer
President Lincoln, sailing from New York to Paramaraibo, reporting plummeting barometric pressure and all the signs weathermen attributed to a forming Atlantic hurricane. The
President Lincoln's weather report, interpreted by weathermen on Bermuda and elsewhere, indicated the storm was moving towards the Caribbean, but no ships in that region made any further weather reports. Using later reports, the storm was later identified as the dissolving remnant of an earlier hurricane which formed south of Atlantis a week previously, but the only ship which tracked it did not have a working wireless set to report the news. Although relatively weak and dissolving, the hurricane remnant moved very quickly south of Bermuda, then curved north along much the same track as the second race leg.
The leading windjammers in the race used the preceding winds to make outstanding time, but the trailing ships caught more of the impact.
Fu Chi reported heavy rain and wind of sixty knots, while
Balgarski Lav and
Benjamin Constant reported sixty-five knot gusts, enough that
Balgarski Lav's captain transmitted the wireless message "Now in hurricane STOP all other conditions normal STOP all ships beware." This message amused the wireless operator of the Romanian
Mircea, who in turn responded "All ships beware of conditions that Bulgarski Lav reports to be normal STOP normal might actually be hurricane."
Despite the worries of many of the trailing ships that they were being overtaken by a hurricane, it soon became obvious that the storm, while it featured high winds and heavy seas, was weak and swinging to the northeast. Only the smallest of the ships ever felt they were in any serious danger, and in all cases, their captains chose courses to preserve the safety of their ships, although many of the smaller vessels lost significant amounts of time by this action.
Some two hundred miles south of Halifax, the
Benjamin Constant still led the
Fu Chi, although the Chinese were slowly regaining ground, when both ships received an urgent distress call from the Nordish-flagged trawler
Erik Segersäll, which frantically reported that the trawler was sinking. Though the Brazilians recognized that by responding to the distress call they would likely forfit the race, they were only thirty miles from the trawler's reported location. The
Constant, after some discussion among her officers, lit her engines and found the
Erik Segersäll barely twenty miles away, capsized but still inexplicably floating. Six of the twelve crewmen were rescued from a lifeboat, and the Brazilians learned from them that four of
Erik Segersäll's engineers were trapped in the overturned trawler, with another two men last seen on a life-raft floating away from the ship. The
Constant's crew managed to bring their ship close to the derelict, and a group of volunteers took one of their launches alongside the trawler. They were astonished to hear four of
Segersäll's engineers, trapped inside the upside-down ship, banging frantically on the hull, and two Brazilian volunteers called for an acetylene torch and hurriedly began cutting a hole to rescue the trapped men. Both of the volunteers were washed into the sea, but when they were pulled out by the ship's longboat, insisted to go back and finish their work. They were joined by a third man with a rotary saw, and together they cut an opening into the bottom of the
Segersäll's engine room. This released the air bubble that had held the ship afloat, but as the ship filled with water, four engineers crawled out onto the keel of the trawler, where they were hastily rescued by the
Benjamin Constant's boats. With two men still known to be missing, the
Benjamin Constant began steaming back and forth through the gathering dusk, searching for the second life raft. After eight hours of searching, the Brazilians found the raft with the remaining two men still alive, and pulled them to safety.
Even as the dramatic rescue of the
Segersäll's crew was carried out, the leading windjammers slipped into Halifax.
Atlantes had retaken the lead, with the
Padua an hour and a half behind, and
Prince of Wales and
Danmark only a few minutes behind the Germans. Romania's
Mircea, having left Bermuda alongside the
British Steel, stunned the Britons by arriving in Halifax a mere four minutes ahead of the British ship. A comparison of the logs showed that the
British Steel had logged a faster average speed, but the Romanians' navigation kept her on a tighter course which was sufficient to give her the upset ending. However, such a narrow edge on the second race leg was insufficient to reverse the
British Steel's speedy run on the first leg, and so the British ship triumphed in their category.
Among the Class A Division III ships, the fast
Alala turned in the fastest time. As the largest of the heritage ships,
Alala was best-suited of the three frigates to again prove her vaunted speed. To the extreme disappointment and disgust of the Canadians,
Atlantic again beat
Bluenose in Class B; but shortly before the honorary prizes were awarded, the Tall Ships Committee discovered that two of
Atlantic's crewmen had turned twenty-five during the voyage, pushing her required crew of under-twenty-five cadets below the required fifty percent, and resulting in
Atlantic's disqualification. This caused a great deal of controversy among the Tall Ships Committee, and inflamed the "speed feud" between
Bluenose and
Atlantic.
In the Class C race, the winner was presumed to be the Atlantean
Flamme, with a total time of seven days and twelve hours; but then, badly belated, the Bulgarian pilot schooner
Topaz arrived, having spent six days conducting repairs and sheltering from the storm in Bermuda. The Bulgarians had therefore slipped behind the hurricane and found easy sailing the entire way, and logging an official time twelve hours faster than the
Flamme, even though they reached Halifax five days behind the other ships.
The
Benjamin Constant, her crew again muttering about "the loser's curse", was the last of the Class A Division I ships to reach Halifax, though she had formally withdrawn from the race to rescue the crew of the
Segersäll. The Tall Ships Committee voted to create the Commendation of Merit to award the
Benjamin Constant for voluntarily withdrawing to conduct livesaving work. This commendation would be formalized with the creation of the "Constant Medal" in December 1939, with a bronze medal featuring a likeness of the Brazilian ship.
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Times[/SIZE]
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Quoted
Originally posted by thesmilingassassin
Wednesday, May 22nd 2024, 9:07pm
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