I'll have a look at that book, thanks. I just purchased it but haven't had a chance to review it.
Now commencing a posting tack for 2001 I wanted to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bluenose with the Canadian Mint Silver Dollar Proof coin mounted in a protective cover inside a black leather box:
Face shows Bluenose port profile with the hands of the naval architect, William Roue drawing the lines on a scroll and his signature.
With the obverse side showing King George V, monarch during 1921.
This will go with my BN when that is finished and under protective cover. Rich
OOPS. . . typo not 2001 posting but current year 2021. ;-( Rich
Nice!
Now I'll have to try to get a dime for photo scaling use from the Canadian neighbor down the street. Rich
From small dimes to heavy anchors, here is a short YouTube (sorry Heinrich) for setting the anchor. Sound has to be turned up and there is a lot of wind noise.
Rich
And from the heavy work to light work making "baggy winkles" or chaffing protection that is seen on some kit's sail plans. https://fb.watch/4hcWK3rD2u/
Rich . . . again
Well now, the anchor went down and briefly back up but the "baggy winkle" was lost along the way. I"ll try again
As the season winds down, the crew make new baggywrinkles to freshen up next year’s rigging! What’s a baggywrinkle? It’s a soft cable covering made... | By Bluenose II | Facebook
As the season winds down, the crew make new baggywrinkles to freshen up next year’s rigging! What’s a baggywrinkle? It’s a soft cable covering made...
fb.watch
She is only tying on one side but a full baggywinkle is around the full line like a huge pipecleaner which I try to use on models after using a hair clipper to reduce the diameter to better match the scale of the model. RichWell now, the anchor went down and briefly back up but the "baggy winkle" was lost along the way. I"ll try again
As the season winds down, the crew make new baggywrinkles to freshen up next year’s rigging! What’s a baggywrinkle? It’s a soft cable covering made... | By Bluenose II | Facebook
As the season winds down, the crew make new baggywrinkles to freshen up next year’s rigging! What’s a baggywrinkle? It’s a soft cable covering made...
The postman delivered this afternoon a new livery:
New on your bookshelf ..... show it here
Great add to your library - I enjoyed this book also very much - 5kg of book - so not for reading during laying in bed ;) Actually the nett weight is 6.4 kg :cool:
shipsofscale.com
Regards, Peter
Since we have old books, photos, and model related resources, here is a YouTube video on sailing schooners, as different than sloops and others:
Rich
A nice video, Rich.
Especially the different sailing combinations. ‘Choice stress’ for what comes on my BN
Regards, Peter
A YouTube with the front end loaded with photos and old movies of the fishing and racing schooners. Look carefully and pause to see the rigging fittings and details that you may want to employ as feasible From BN to BNIIA nice video, Rich.
Especially the different sailing combinations. ‘Choice stress’ for what comes on my BN
Regards, Peter
MARCH 21, 2021
100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LAUNCHING OF BLUENOSE MARCH 21. Have your beverage of choice handy to commemorate this event as you work on your model. It will be a long time before her 200th. Rich (PT-2)
Let me try to past in some background on William Roue, Bluenose designer that surprised me regarding his background;
I am not sure how this posting will turn out as after opening the newsletter you will have to scroll down to the blog and button about The Vision Behind the Bluenose. Rich
Just read this posts - the Launch of the Bluenose was on the 26th and not 21st March
So tomorrow is the anniversary !!!
So tomorrow is the anniversary !!!
Looking back for ships registered as Bluenose before 1921 the following list has been copied and pasted which does not advance your YQ models but adds to the brain bucket hold contents:
Library Catalogue
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Nova Scotia Archives
Bluenose: A Canadian Icon
Vessels Registered Under the Name: Bluenose - Prior to 1921
Built in 1839 at St. Stephen, NB, by Messrs. Todd & McAllister
Registered: St. Andrews, NB, #7/1839
Owners: William Todd Jr. and John McAllister
Registered St. Andrews, NB, #14/1848
Owner: William Lancaster
Registered Liverpool, England, #353/1850
Owned by Thomas Miller MacKay and William Cowley Miller
Registered London, England, #493/1853
Built in 1850 at Mahone Bay, NS, by Elkanah Zwicker
Registered Lunenburg, NS, #18/1850
Owners: Casper Eisenhaur and Peter Eisenhaur
Registered Halifax, NS, #16/1851
Owner: James Murphy
Registered Halifax, NS, #14/1853
Owner: Joseph Mason and John McGrath
Registered Halifax, NS, #61/1854
Owners: Peter Martin Jr., George Martin Jr., William Martin and George Martin Sr.
Registered Yarmouth, NS, #5/1863
Owners: Robert Lonergan and John Lonergan
Sold foreign in 1865 at St. Pierre & Miquelon
Built in 1860 at Weymouth, NS
Registered Yarmouth, NS, #40/1860
Owners: Samuel and John Killam
Sold foreign in 1868 at Amsterdam
Built in 1865 at Truro, NS, by John Sanderson & Son
Registered Halifax, NS, #91/1865
Owners: John Dickie, Samuel Rettie, John Yuill, John Sanderson, Arthur Cochran et al.
Lost at sea in 1871
Built in 1889 at Caraquet, NB, by Joseph Sewell
Registered Chatham, NB, #31/1893
Owner: Joseph Sewell
Broken up. Registration closed 1920
Built in 1891 at Saint John, NB, by Frederick E. Sayer
Registered Saint John, NB, #9/1898
Owner: George Holder
Broken up at Marble Cove, 1919
Built in 1903 at Falmouth, NS, by Thomas W. McKinley
Registered Windsor, NS, #3/1903
Owner: --
Registered Bridgetown, Barbados 1916
November 14, 1919: Foundered off Peniche, Spain with a cargo of dried fish.
Built in 1921 at Lunenburg, NS, by Smith & Rhuland
Registered Lunenburg, NS, #8/1921
Owner: Bluenose Schooner Co., Ltd.
Registered Lunenburg, NS, #11/1936 on installation of an engine: 78.59 Tons
Owner: Bluenose Schooner Co. Ltd.
August 16, 1941: sold to Angus Walters
September 5, 1941: Walters sold 33 shares to 13 different people
June 27, 1942: Walters became sole owner
July 2, 1942: Walters sold the vessel to the West Indies Trading Co.
July 2, 1942: Mortgage of $16,000 to Angus Walters
Mortgage discharged November 2, 1842
Register closed 19 December, 1944 on sale to US Citizens
Amendment Jan 26, 1945 states the vessel under Honduras Flag
Lost off Haiti Jan. 29, 1946
Rich
Here is an article from Mac;eans Magazine, June 15. 1950. "The Tragedy of the Bluenose"
It is the first description of the a evens of her grounding by the captain as included in this article. Long reading but it brings images and emotions to mind that may be worth the time.
MACLEANS’S MAGAZINE June 15, 1950 THE TRAGEDY OF THE BLUENOSE For 25 years she queened the Banks. Yanks challenged her in vain. A proud nation put her on its coins. She wore the King’s sails. Then, in 1946, a humble tramp, she died on a far shore. Lunenburg mourns as if it were yesterday J U N E 1 5 1 9 5 0 C H A R L E S R A W L I N G S THE TRAGEDY OF THE BLUENOSE The End of a Thoroughbred There is remorse. “Bluenose! You know how Loon’burg feels? Like somebody just buried their mother. Home now after the funeral, they sit in the kitchen and remember they didn’t treat her very good when she was alive.” And much recrimination. “Bluenose! The Government should have saved her. Blockhouses! Archives! They save things like that, but not Bluenose. The greatest topmast schooner the world ever knew. Perfection! A beautiful model of the past. She should have been saved for history. Good God, the harbor is empty without her. The rich men of Lunenburg wouldn’t give of their fortune when it would have done some good. They are sorry now that she is lost down dere.” It took some searching to find just where “down dere” is. Lunenburg feels so badly it does not like to think of that soft night in the tropics when she died. No one could remember the romantic name of the place where her bones are. Buried in the files of the Progressive, the town’s weekly newspaper, we found it. Wilson Berringer, a former Lunenburger who commanded her on her last voyage, wrote home about it. With Bluenose and his fourman crew, probably natives, he was waiting for orders in Jacmel Bay, Haiti. Bluenose was flying the house flag of her last owners, the West Indies Trading Company with head offices in Tampa and Havana. The trading company had purchased her in 1942. That sale, now so bitter a transaction in Lunenburg, was not without its mitigating circumstances when it was made. The submarine war was at its worst. Prospects of trade and fishing in the North Atlantic were dark. Bluenose, a moneymaker as long as her master, Angus Walters, was on her deck, did not prosper under substitute command. She had not earned enough to pay her way and square up for a pair of $7,000 diesels bedded in 1936. The West Indies needed her. The tramp ship traffic normally supplying the Caribbean had been driven to cover by the undersea war. The islands were hungry. Sailing hulls, too insignificant and scattered to warrant a German attack, were in desperate demand. Bluenose, a fine carrier with her big hull (112 feet long at waterline, 27-foot beam) worked nobly from 1942 to war’s But now the war was over and it was January, 1946, in Jacmel Bay. Get under way at once, Berringer’s orders came, and make a run in ballast to Aux Cayes, 68 miles due west along the coast. Getting under way at once meant that the last of the voyage would be made in darkness, a tricky business. There is a one-and-a-half mile passage between the reefs into Aux Cayes. On Isle Vache, five miles south of the channel, there is a flashing light but nothing else; no buoys or ranges. The currents, changing with wind and tide, are treacherous. The soundings, dating back to 1830, are unreliable. Berringer, fearful of the reef and the unknowns, set a course a half-point more northerly than usual but in spite of it Bluenose made too much southing. At 7.20 p.m. a squall broke on her. At 7.40 the bow lookout screamed breakers and in an instant she was on the reef. Berringer reversed her engines and put the wheel hard astarboard and she came off a quarter length. Then a heavy swell struck her and laid her on her port beam and slid her back up the wicked coral. With every slow, powerful sea breaking over her now, Berringer and his crew crawled forward and got their lone dory launched without swamping and made the nearest island behind the reef. It was unoccupied.Berringer came back alone in the moonlight. With her spars acant and her port rail under water she was dark and lonely on the moonlit reef. The big tradewind swell, slow, relentless, beautiful, was bursting silver as it hammered her. He watched his chance and managed to get a few things (he did not say what they were). Getting away a sea caught him and injured a leg and broke a small bone in one of his hands but he rejoined his men and they waited for dawn. He took three of them and went back. In daylight she was, to quote him. “a hard-looking case.” Her back was broken and the break extended up to the deck where she had opened thwartship all across her break beam (the transverse beam where the quarterdeck lifts a step up from the midship). Below she was half full of water churning so violently that none of her people could reach their clothes. Later with the sea down and help from Aux Cayes, those expensive, tragic engines were salvaged. She sleeps better without A Sprite at Her Bow Of her, save for Wallace MacAskill’s excellent photographs and a few trinkets taken out before she left the Maritimes—a bell that has lately become noisy for one—nothing intrinsic remains. There is only the mingled rage and sorrow of her loss and her saga. It is a live and growing saga. Like all great creatures she was touched with mystery. She had a magic bow. It came about this way. In 1920, W. H. Dennis, proprietor of the Halifax Herald, announced the International Fishermen’s Trophy for working ships. According to the rules, contenders had to be rugged enough for the salt-fish trade and to have spent a season on the Banks. The course was to be about 40 miles; the prize, $4,000 for the winner, $1,000 for the loser. That year, off Halifax, Gloucester’s smart little schooner Esperanto soundly trounced the pick of the Lunenburg fleet, a good heavy workhorse named Delawanna. This would never do. Bluenose was conceived and built at once to retrieve the lost honor. Her design was entrusted to W. J. Roue of Halifax, who was just emerging from the amateur phase of a career that has gone on until he must be listed next to Donald MacKay as the greatest marine designing genius Canada has ever produced. He gave her a sheer that left low head room in the forward end of her forecastle. The building yard of Smith and Rhuland at Lunenburg, where she was hull No. 200 and something, had built from whittled-out models — a rule-ofthumb yard—for a quarter century. Bluenose’s blueprints grew dog-eared as they were studied and followed step by step. The low-ceilinged forecastle revealed itself when she was in full frame and the deck stringers were going into her. It would never do. A man could hit his noggin in that low place jumping out of bunk in a hurry. Who ever heard of a forecastle that did not have plenty of room to jig in? Starting from just aft the forecastle hatchway, the deck was given a new sheer that measured a full foot increase at the stemhead. What a nose that gave Old Stormalong! With her big bowsprit jutting out of it she seemed to glower like an angry she-elephant, trunk extended, ready to charge. Roue had given her great power forward, a virtue the change in sheer should not have affected one way or the other, but when she demonstrated she could sail dry decked and easily triumphant up a wind and sea that drowned her rivals, men looked at each other in wonder. It must be her bow! That adzman’s rule-of-thumb change in her had been guided by miraculous luck. Not science and human genius had made her great, but a last-minute happenstance. There was her wraithlike bow wave to further the superstition. It was no ordinary boil of spume hurtling off a rushing cutwater. It was light and airy. Sometimes if a man stared into it long enough it showed him a hollow within; a beautiful watery crypt shot with rainbow. If the rum had not been too long, all “Look! See dere! A Continued on page 48 Continued from page 45 fairy: gold hair, fish’s tail and all, ridin’ wit’.”Roue smiled and let the pretty fancy live on. There was in truth a hollow inside her wave. He had called for her planking to be rabbeted into the sides of her stem, yacht fashion. Traditional fisherman construction insisted that it be rabbeted into the back of it. Into the back of her big oak stem it went. The planking instead of fairing smooth was drawn in to make a slight ridge in her at the exact place where she turned her wave and her quick water was spinning as it fell away. There were several attempts to copy her. None of them was any good. Man, her myth insists, could not copy as spooky a ship as she. Angus Walters chuckled when we asked him about it. “That spook is upstairs in one of my trunks: her plans,” he said. “They went in the day she was launched in 1921 and have never come out for anybody. Those fellas who tried to copy her squinted and whittled models. At night, when she was on the ways, they tried to measure her lines with calipers of long sticks. How could they copy Bluenose that way? I probably couldn’t build her new, plans and all, and have something exactly the same. She would be a hard vessel to copy.” The Magic of Long Albert Her true mystery is there: the mys! tery of all ships. They have, each one an individual being, a soul if you are a sailor and a realist. No two ship personalities are ever exactly alike. Even one-design dinghies fashioned of mahogany cut off the same log, with fastening identical to the ounce, can be as unI like as littermate puppies or your own children. Bluenose was given the gift of greatness; great luck and great personality as well as great speed and power. There will never be her like Because ships are that way seafarers insist there is a Fiddler’s Green, the hereafter of the lost good ones. If there is such a watery annex to Paradise, the International Cup could enjoy a ghostly revival there. The whole fleet can muster now. The Ford broke up on the Newfoundland coast. The Elsie was lost off St. Pierre. Columbia floundered off Sable Island in the hurricane of August, 1927. Thebaud was rammed and lost in the harbor of LaGuaira, Venezuela, in a February, 1948, gale. The yarns about the racing are distilling down now with the years, shedding the dull figures and dates and leaving those facets of the saga that are going on into folklore. The gargantuan arguments are now shorn of all bitterness. The colossal rum-drinking no longer has a headache. Even that Fairway Buoy in Halifax Harbor that Bluenose, racing Columbia, passed on the wrong side to her undoing during the 1923 race bobs happily, shed of all rancor, in the happy stream of reminis- For our money Long Albert Himmelman emerges as her never-to-be forgotten character. He was a captain in his own vessel but Bluenose’s sheet trimmer in the racing. He was a very tall, thin powerful Lunenburger. “is it my fault mother gave rre a haircut with a hole in it?” he explained his bald, domed head. He was below in Bluenose’s cabin one afternoon early in her career when her many whims were being studiedHe stopped off talking suddenly and stared "She feels,” he said, jumping up, "a leetle rope-bound.” He ran up on deck and eased her sheet "this much,” letting her great 80-foot main boom just creak outward. As if that microscopic change in trim had started an engine within her, Bluenose perked up and sped away. His uncanny ability to feel trim'and rate of speed by some strange inward sense helped him discover where Bluenose liked her ballast. Unlike other schooners who relish it midships and aft or midships and forward, Bluenose insisted that her pig iron be stowed in her two ends. Too much forward however would kill her as dead as a scow. Angus Walters used that knowledge on the rare instances when he wanted her to look slower than she was. He could kill her in light air by simply ordering men forward . In the second race against the Ford, off Gloucester, in 1922, Bluenose’s crew knew her power to windward better than Gloucester did then—although Gloucester learned all about it later. They liked the look of the sky that day. It held promise of wind. The first leg from Gloucester Breakwater to Thatcher’s Light, however, started off in light air. It was a short four-mile reach with sheets well off and the two vessels were within easy conversational distance all the way. First one would take the lead and then the other. Ford had won the first race, a drifting match that barely finished within the time limit, and the Yankees were cocky. Boasts and invective and taunts and dire threats filled the air back and forth. Slowly the sky’s promise paid off. Knot by knot the wind picked up. Just in time to be lead boat around Thatcher’s with a long, true windward leg in prospect, Bluenose slid into the lead. With her wind clear she would have her weather and her kind of sailing in 10 seconds. Long Albert ran aft and standing on Bluenose’s very stern he shouted back at the Ford.“If you gentlemen got anything further to say, say it now,” he warned. “From now on it’ll cost you postage.” He was lost a few years later in his own vessel with all hands somewhere between St. Pierre and Bay of Islands, Newfoundland. He was caught in a fall gale, bound up after herring. “All of Canada Owned Her” Angus Walters lives in a big white house around the corner from the Lunenburg foundry’s office. The years have been kind to him. He is a trifle slighter, a trifle more disarmingly mild-mannered than when he sailed Bluenose to her victories and she, in turn, made him the Dominion’s most famous Nova Scotian. There was something about the little skipper’s coiled energy, explosive force that Bluenose loved. She thrived under his dynamic energy in leash, his violence under wraps and understood him when it burst forth. He possesses it still. He was talking about Haligonian, the Canadian schooner designed by Roue for a Halifax syndicate to beat Bluenose'. Bluenose beat her easily in two match races in 1926. “I knew what she was before they matched us,” he said. “We’d met her outside in the fishing. I’d watched her sail. ‘Don’t talk race,’ 1 begged Roue. ‘Please, Mr. Roue, for your sake, don’t talk race.’ ‘We’ve got to race,’ Roue said ‘All right,’ I said. I won’t do a thing. No racing canvas. Nothing special. We’ll just wash up and come as we are from the fishing.’ They took Haligonian up to Halifax and got all tuned up. We came in and they passed us coming up the harbor. On the wharf there were two fellows. ‘How do you feel about meeting the Haligonian?’ they said ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t make a practice of talking about my vessel before a race. You can see both of us and decide for yourself. I don’t like to make any prophecies. But I’ll tell you (and that mild, almost soft voice of the little skipper’s did not lift; only there was a sharpening twinkle in the steelblue of his eyes), you and your partner bring a couple of boxes of good cigars down to meet us when we get in after tomorrow’s race. I and my boys will have them half smoked before Haligonian’s got a line ashore.’ Talk of the sale of Bluenose came up in our interview. Captain Walters and a syndicate of his friends were the party of the second part in that transaction. They sold her. “Don’t think the effort to keep her here wasn’t made,” he said. “It was. There were a few of us who knew what she meant not only to this place but to Canada. But there were just a few of us—too few. Nobody else cared enough then. Now they do.” There was the matter of the noisy bell. It had been taken off Bluenose some years before. A society of Nova Scotians in Alberta wrote asking for some memento of her. Captain Walters granted them the bell. The storm of protest that followed has dinned in his ears. It has reached the editorial pages of the Maritime Press and been voiced on the radio. “I’ll tell you why I sent that bell out West,” he said. “I was the one who used to get the letters. I took her up the Lakes. I knew what she belonged to. Not just Lunenburg and Nova Scotia. All of Canada owned Bluenose. There were these people out there. They gloried in her even though they could never see her sail. I appreciated them and so did she. I thought they deserved her bell if they wanted it.” But Lunenburg is where all Canada pictures Bluenose. That is where her memorial will stand someday. If there is a young sculptor in the house right now—a young genius who can stand up for himself in a bargain because Lunenburg never could help shopping just a trifle over price—he might do well to hie him out to the eastward. A marble likeness of just a portion of her stern say with its beautiful fashion piece and the gold letters of her name would look good out Rouses Brook way overlooking the harbor. Or maybe her wheel and a bit of her deck with Long Albert down to leeward on one bony knee as he used to kneel steering her by the luff of her towering canvas. Or the little skipper himself with the after end of her 80-foot main boom slatting over as he jibed her. Lunenburg is in the mood for a memorial. A beautiful mood when one thinks about it. A whole county tearful with grief for a vessel.
Rich (PT-2)
As a couple of new offerings which touch upon Sterling Hayden when he was a schooner crewman, was aboard when racing the Thebaud, and lastly his parting from Hollywood to return to the sea in his pilot boat Wanderer. Here are some links that I hope you may be able to bring up:
https://youtu.be/CLwS7yPz89o
The Racing Schooners and Sterling Hayden
RACING SCHOONERS: Sterling Hayden Versus Bluenose - Wave Train
Sterling Hayden: Mastheads to Movies and Back Again - Sail Magazine
Sterling Hayden and Wanderer (tadroberts.ca)