NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Bass Strait, avoidance of
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2003 May 26, 13:20 +1000
From: Peter Fogg
Date: 2003 May 26, 13:20 +1000
----- Original Message ----- From: "George Huxtable" > Remember, the islands of New Zealand are slap in the way of that passage > ...passing either side of > Tasmania to aim for the Horn....etc Once through Bass Strait ships had a thousand miles to negotiate the potential problems of NZ in the way and, as Joseph Conrad reminds us, that is a respectable distance. > > Stretching a string on the globe..shows there's very little difference in distance travelled, > between passing North of Tasmania through Bass Strait, and passing South, > off Tasmania's Southern capes, ..etc The point is not the relative distances but the different mindset of the old dudes due to not expecting to know with any precision their position. Both routes have their advantages and disadvantages. To my mind that long dash to the south while being pushed ever closer to the rocky western coast of Tasmania would be a kind of slow nightmare, as it could take a week or more. Which would be worse, a typical roaring westerly or a rarer calm spell, drifting ever closer due to the current, but more slowly towards that lee shore? But its easier for me to prefer Bass Strait since I expect, one way and another, to always have a very good idea where I am. And a reliable motor. In the good'ole'days ships piled up regularly in both places, though probably more so in Bass Strait. King Island (in Bass Strait) was a notorious collector of ships. Now it is famous for its dairy products: fine cream and cheeses. The legend goes that the shipwrecks contributed the grains inside mattresses stuffed with straw from far-off places from which grew the rich grasses that now feed these cows. Not sorry to be hardly diverging at all from the original thread. Bibliography - such as it is .. This detour to avoid Bass Strait may have been mentioned, among others, by Francis Chichester in his book 'Along the Clipper Way' and by Eric Newby who sailed on one of the last of the sailing grain ships in the late 1930s and wrote about that trip in his book with a title something like 'The Last Grain Race'. The chap who served a late apprenticeship under sail, in a variety of sailing trading boats, and who went on to become a sailing ship's master himself was Alan Villiers, title of his book forgotten. One of these boats was the James Craig, which has been splendidly restored and now sails, again, out of Sydney. Excuse me for being vague; I'm happy to read books but avoid collecting them (possessions are a burden).