Cats and Fishes. Sigh.
OK. I think I know what I am going to do for my GH. I will discuss that inmy next post. But my discussions with various people have really made me wonder exactly HOW these heavy anchors were moved around safely. By safely, I mean without damaging the ship. I assume that "damaging" a sailor was not considered as seriously!
I understand the principle. Consider weighing anchor (and dropping is just reversing this). We pull the anchor up by the anchor cable.
Once it breaks the surface a hook is attached to the anchor ring. The hook is on the cat block and the cat head is used to raise the anchor out of the water, and up to the cat head. So far so good. There is a famous picture of this happening in the Sovereign of the Seas:
Now, to turn the anchor horizontal for storage we use a fish davit, which is a beam that has a tackle at the end. It is hooked onto the flukes of the anchor and then this line raises the anchor to become horizontal. It is then tied into place with various lines. I am reasonably happy with that. In principle.
There is a nice video
here showing this process on a model. (It is more modern ship than the GH but I am more interested in the principle, at the moment!)
Here is a still showing how this works. Note that in this ship there is a single davit which is moved from side to side, according to which anchor is being worked. There are two spanshackles on the deck, slightly to either side fo the centre line. Each is used to hold the davit in place when it is working on the anchor on the opposite side to the spanshackle. eg this is how to raise the anchor into the yellow position, on the channel.
But there is also an anchor forward of the channels - and this is the one used mostly if I have understood correctly. I have drawn that one in red. The davit in the picture above is in a good position for storing an anchor on the channel but not for storing an anchor forward of the channel. eg the red anchor. That seems to require a davit inthe position as shown in red?
Indeed I notice that the davit has a support on the side rails...and indeed there are four! And they are in about the postions required according to my diagrams
So in short it seems to me that we need two davits on each side?
When there was one movable davit, that is fine. But later ships had one davit fixed in postion, but it extended over both sides of the ship. Still, it is locked in ONE position...
I was told by a real sailing ship master: "The davits can be moved and tackles rigged from under the tops through runner pendants." So that seems to support moving the davits when you want to access the four different anchors.
If true, the the angle of the spanshackles needs to change as the davit moves from the position for the yellow anchor to the postion for the red anchor.
Do the spanshackles rotate?
Any explanation will be greatly appreciated!
Ships at sea for lengthy periods had anchor ropes removed and stowed since they were not expecting to use the anchor for some time.
