HELMA
Dear Editors,
I was delighted with your cover story, “HELMA: A 1938 Spidsgatter reborn,” in WB No. 296. I crewed on her out of San Pedro, California, when my friend Robert Sisler owned her in the 1960s. She was then named BOUT, and is a fine, lovely little sailing boat. Once, in 1963, we had a rough and memorable voyage north dead into the wind and wicked waves around Point Conception. Although the mainsail blew out near San Miguel Island, BOUT did fine, continuing under a spare reefed main and jib. Bob even singlehanded her to Hawaii and back in 1966. She is well deserving of the restoration described in Tom Jackson’s article. To quote Joshua Slocum, “it is a law in Lloyd’s that the JANE repaired all out of the old until she is entirely new is still the JANE.”
R.N. Bradley
via email
Of Squaresails and Norse Boats
Dear Editors,
I really like the pieces on Norse boats in WB No. 296 (“On the Edge of an Axe: Building a traditional Viking boat in modern times,” by Matthew Barnes; and “The Plywood Gislinge Boat: A stitch-and-glue interpretation of a Nordic craft,” by John C. Harris). Harris notes that he went with the dipping-lug rig due to the complexity of the lines in rigging the boat for square sailing. I want to point out that in my Åfjords faering of about the same size (the boat is now the property of Atlantic Challenge in Rockland, Maine), I need only three lines to run the square sail: the halyard; the bolina, or bowline, that runs from leech to leech via a block or “beehole” in the stemhead; and the sheet, which runs from clew to clew. Just like the dipping lug, the yard must be lowered to tack, which is done by the skipper. The secret is that you put an oar over and turn the boat through the wind with a few strokes on that oar.
Tacking a traditional Norse squaresail, as described in the four-book series Nordlandsbåten og Åfjordsbåten, by Gunnar Eldjarn.
Without Norwegian instructors, I had to learn this by reading. I found Gunnar Eldjarn’s four-book series Nordlandsbåten og Åfjordsbåten in the Rockland-based Apprenticeshop library and studied the photos and illustrations. The drawing reproduced on the opposite page showed me how these small boats tacked. It’s not a difficult process, but, when I went sailing, I handled the sail; steering was the easy part.
Once the crew learns the process, it isn’t any slower than tacking a dipping lug. Additionally, the square sail does not need jibing, which makes management of the rig much easier than a lugsail when sailing downwind. The biggest advantage of the dipping lug is that the boat doesn’t need the oar to tack. I think the sail is a bit more efficient because the leech hooks some going upwind. I offer this detail so that re-enactors and others who want to try a square sail are encouraged to do so. One quirk of the square sail is that the boat must be beam-on to the wind to raise the sail!
I was reminded when first starting with these boats that they are rowing boats with a sail. There are some clubs around Bergen, Norway, where similar boats are raced with modern sloop rigs and one class where they have added a daggerboard. I understand from the Norwegian traditional-boat specialist Arne Emil Christiansen that the rudders of these boats moved from the starboard aft side to the sternpost in about the 13th century; the boats also adopted rabbeted stems at about this time. These changes were possibly influenced by Hanseatic traders coming north for fish.
Ben Fuller
Cushing, Maine
Erratum
In Ben Fuller’s letter in WB No. 296, the location and ownership of the Hampton boat KINGFISHER is inaccurately stated. KINGFISHER is in the Maine Maritime Museum collection, not the Penobscot Marine Museum.
—Eds.
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