Sam Llewellyn is editor of The Marine Quarterly, http://www.marinequarterly.com,
and author of nautical thrillers. Three years ago he bought a Corribee on eBaySam Llewellyn
Flotsam and jetsam
T
he weather is too
cold for epoxy
to cure, let alone
sailing. The mind
wandering, I
picked up an
ancient volume entitled I Sailed
with Chinese Pirates. It is set in
the 1920s, at a time when the
arch-villain Dr Fu Manchu was
supposed to be twirling his long
moustaches in his lacquer offi ce
behind the opium den in the
Street of a Thousand Nasal
Obstructions. The author, an
obvious fantasist, spends plenty
of time in fan tan hells and
houses of ill fame, trying
unsuccessfully to get to know
some real pirates. When he
does make contact, he fi nds
the quarry nasty, brutish and
short, and not much happens.
The attention therefore drifted
past the pirates to their junks:
enormous things with cocked-
up sterns, propelled by sails like
huge Venetian blinds made of
bamboo matting set on as many
as fi ve masts. In the absence
of breeze, these monsters are
propelled by the telegraph-pole-
Practical Junk Rig by Blondie Hasler: ‘In the
fi rst OSTAR, sailed in 1960, Blondie sailed in
second. He is said to have been wearing a
cardigan and carpet slippers, and to have
spent the long voyage tasting fi ne wines’
Extracting gold
from junk
Perusal of an ancient volume, I Sailed
With Chinese Pirates, leads circumstantially
to an extended contemplation of the
sound good sense inherent in favouring a junk rig
thick sculling oars known as
yulohs. Their construction
divides the hull into dozens
of independently buoyant
compartments. Their fl at
bottoms, pierced in some types
by many centreboards, make
them practical in shallow
waters. Their enormous size – up
to 450ft long – made it possible
for a fl eet of them to sail from
China to colonise America
in the 15th century (if you
believe 1421 , Bantam, £10.99,
a rather odd history by the
ex-submariner Gavin Menzies).
Where they drift, the mind
drifts with them.Easy to manage
When we lived in a shack off
Georgian Bay in Canada, we
would occasionally see passing
the junk belonging to Professor J
Tuzo Wilson, one of the biggest
beasts in the then newish fi eld
of plate tectonics. The great man
had imported this vessel from
Hong Kong, and fl ew from its
ensign staff a Maple Leaf and
from its masthead a huge banner
bearing Chinese characters that
were (unreliably) reputed to read
‘Death to the Running Dogs
of the University of Toronto
Geomorphology Department’.
During the 1960s, an
obsession with junks stopped
being evidence of eccentricity,and became an indicator of
sound good sense. People who
have sailed actual junks claim
that they make appalling
quantities of leeway. But their
rig, as all the world knows, is
effi cient, easy to reef, and easy
to manage. In the fi rst OSTAR,
sailed in 1960, many non-junk-
rig contestants staggered into
Newport, Rhode Island crusted
with salt and ravaged by sleep
deprivation. Blondie Hasler,
author of Practical Junk Rig,
sailed in second, with his
head poking out of the hatch
in the junk-rigged Jester’s
superstructure. He is said to
have been wearing a cardigan
and carpet slippers, and to have
spent the long voyage tasting
fi ne wines.
There is plenty of junk rig
about still, and its devotees form
the Junk Rig Association, http://www.
junkrigassociation.org. Perhaps
the most notable exponent is
Roger Taylor, who in his two
junk-rigged Mingmings has sailed
as far afi eld as Svalbard. No fi ne
wines for Roger. Mingming II is
an Achilles 24, a luxurious affair
after Mingming I, a Corribee, nose
and stern fi lled with buoyancy,
leaving a cabin with the cubic
capacity of a smallish estate car
(see http://www.thesimplesailor.com).
Roger’s style of voyaging is the
perfect antidote to a world inwhich a 47ft boat with hot
and cold running everything
is increasingly regarded as
the minimum for the
cruising couple.
Mingming’s sail has in the past
been a pretty ramshackle object,
much patched and with no
shape to speak of. Recent junk
rig thinking, epitomised by
Sunbird Marine (www.
sunbirdmarine.com), has
refi ned the aerodynamics
until they approach the
mathematical sophistication
of an Airbus’s wing...
But it is February, and the
mind cannot cope with
equations. It drifts to a fl at grey
morning in the delta of the
Pearl River. On the long teak
deck of our fi ve-masted junk,
small men in black pyjamas aretramping round a capstan,
hauling the mainsail up the
mast. Forward, someone is
unbrailing the sail on the
forward-raked mast that is
almost a bowsprit. Aft, a little
sail forward and to windward of
the mizzen is cranked outboard,
blowing the stern round. The
sheets, one for each batten,
hang in slack festoons, then take
up as the breeze catches them.
The sails swing and fi ll. With a
universal groan of timber and
cordage, the huge hull heels
to port and begins to track
towards the horizon. Below,
the phoenixes in the cages
on top of the cargo of jade
boulders and opium bales
screech harshly over the
crescendo gurgle of the wake.
To the horizon, and beyond!Roger Taylor’s Mingming circa 2006