Windjammer - part one

In 1958 my parents took me to a film …

Windjammer was a documentary of kinds. It followed a Norwegian square-rigger, the Christian Radich, as she crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean, sailed up the U.S. east coast and back to Europe. For a ten-year old, the story would have been entrancing enough as an ordinary movie, but, for the Fifties, the film's technology was extraordinary.  

Most people under forty are likely unaware of the Cinemiracle system. The huge curved screen was 120 degrees wide; the film was shot with three cameras and shown with three projectors, which 'joined' the films. The advanced stereo sound was based on seven channel recording. This pullout picture of the Christian Radich in New York harbour is from the book you could buy at the cinema. 

Technology for producing and then showing the film was so expensive and cumbersome that Windjammer was the only film ever produced in the Cinemiracle format. 

As the projection systems no longer exist, I haven't seen Windjammer in nearly half a century, but, its impact was lifelong. The film was the source of a child's, then adult's, daydream that, someday, I would go to sea on a tall ship. 

Now I have. I'm just home from a voyage on the Star Clipper. For much of October and November, she crossed the Atlantic from the south of France, through the Strait of Gibraltar and on, by way of the Canaries and Madeira, to the Caribbean. 

Shown in the handout picture above, she is the loveliest of vessels, built in 1992 with a 226 foot mainmast that is tallest of any tall ship. Here she is below as I saw her in the Mediterranean. 

Aside from sailing - sailing as opposed to steaming or motoring or whatever it is that ships do - across an ocean, I was attracted by what also interests me in freighters. This is mixing with the crew and watching how a vessel's handled in a way impossible on normal cruise ships.

Below are a crewman at the wheel, the second officer and captain (on the right). The captain's Ukrainian and trained when Soviet merchant marine cadets learned much of their calling on sailing ships. 

Alan Villiers was an Australian who went to sea in the last days of tall merchant ships just before World War Two. He wrote:

"Those sailing ships are a tough school. They're meant to be. The sea is not a calling for softies … seamanship is best learned under sail." 

Fortunately for this softie, I'm on a mid-autumn crossing, generally a time of calm seas and fair winds to the west.

Best of all, someone else - the crew come from twenty-five countries - is doing the work.

Here, using an industrial sewing machine, they're mending sails. Star Clipper carries 36,000 square feet of sail made of Dacron.

The Clipper has clocked an impressive 17 knots, though not with me around. For a short time, it would be exhilarating, but, having been in rough weather on container ships and yachts, I know it would become very tiring very quickly. Coping with days (and nights) of a constant heel, shuddering and shifting, is not just physically - it's also mentally - wearing. 

I found this painting - very image of a tall ship - on the Clipper. Such a ship needed fit, competent, brave men. Not transatlantic bloggers.