Sail souvenirs

Reaching down memory lane in the Big Shed

- Sam Llewellyn

Having been engrossed in editing a first-hand account of the Battle of Jutland for The Marine Quarterly, I realised I had been at the desk all morning, thinking about high explosives and huge steel steamships. It was raining, and it had hardly bothered to get light, and it was necessary to get some air and think about sails. So I went out to the Big Shed and started leafing through the collection.

This may conjure up snowy racks of neatly-flaked Dacron, exquisitely catalogued by size and weight. Not so. The sails lurk in grubby bags hung from rusty nails on walls of naked stone. Spiders scuttled around as I pulled down the first one. It was a tiny lateen, made as a response to the opening of a canoe hire firm on the river Wye, which meant that the river was crammed with stag-party canoeists floating downstream in big yelling rafts. The wind was blowing upstream that year; so the only way to get any peace on the river in my personal Canadian canoe was to get out a pair of garden shears and cut out something vaguely Arabian, and to sail upstream while the stag-do folk wallowed downstream with their beer.

Next bag.