Evanston: a name comes home
Evanston: a name comes home
From the other side of the world came another email about Moitessier’s JOSHUA, sent by Jean-Francois, a Canadian presently in Perth, Australia, who kindly gave me permission to share it and his photos.
Your last post struck a chord with me. Indeed Joshua is in La Rochelle; I have sailed her. I very much like Moitessier and his books, and a few years back when the show was in Paris, I found out she was in La Rochelle, that she belonged to the Maritime Museum and that you can charter her (it was Moitessier’s belief that a boat belongs in the water, and so when the museum bought her, he was aboard when they sailed her in, and they promised to keep her afloat and sailing. You have to give it to the French for making a national property available to the people).
It was my wife’s fist sail ever and she loved it, snug in the cabin sitting beside the stove looking out. But I had set the bar pretty high, so a few months later when a friend of ours invited us to sail in Montreal, on a sunny windless day, she asked me “are we going to get very wet?”.
So my first born son is named Joshua .
Many of you know that Moitessier named his ketch after Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail around the world alone, a naturalized U.S. citizen, but Canadian born in Nova Scotia. So Canadian ‘Joshua’ to Canadian ‘Joshua’ via France.
The slip in which Carol and I lived aboard THE HAWKE OF TUONELA in Boston was within sight of where Joshua Slocum kept the SPRAY the winter before he left on his circumnavigation. He did not spend that winter aboard.
We anchored a few times in Vineyard Haven, at Martha’s Vineyard, where he bought a farm, mostly for his wife, and from where he sailed on his final voyage, an intended passage to the West Indies during which he disappeared at sea at age 65.
Naturally I pause and note the differences in our ages.
Slocum never learned to swim. Obviously I did or he would have outlived me by more than a decade.
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Chris sent me another photo of the pretty little cutter, GIRL JOYCE, on whose name board you may be able to see the date she was built: 1855. From the photos she seems to be in excellent condition for any boat, much less one 158 years old. Some boats just look right; and I think GIRL JOYCE is one of them.
He also relates that the varnished hull in the background is a 8 meter class.
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I had expected that my new mast and boom would ship next week. They won’t. The mast is ready; the boom is not. This is an minor inconvenience that is actually a cause for respect. Buzz Ballenger informs me that GANNET’s main sheet bails are 18” forward of the normal Moore 24 position and align with one of the standard cutouts to lighten the boom, which is not structurally desirable. He will put the boom they had planned to send me aside and custom cut out another. I admire his professionalism.
Hopefully this boom will be anodized and everything ready to ship by the end of the month.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013