Practical Boat Owner - February 2016

86

T

he seas around
the South
Cornish coast
are treacherous
in the extreme,
with reefs littering
the waters off Land’s End and
the Isles of Scilly some 28
miles to the south-west. Two
reefs are especially hazardous;
the notorious Wolf Rock, eight
miles south-west off Land’s
End, marked by a lighthouse,
and Seven Stones, east-north-
east off the Isles of Scilly,
indicated by the Seven
Stones light vessel.
Critically, the channel between
the Isles of Scilly and Seven
Stones is just seven miles wide,
an almost impossibly narrow
gap for navigating a massive
974ft-long supertanker with a
68.7ft draught; disaster can
only be a compass degree of
inaccuracy away, a fact which
proved fatal for the doomed

A blaze of glory

Mike Taylor catches up with the famous lifeboat Guy And

Clare Hunter, now in private hands, which continues

to be lovingly maintained in her original condition

tanker Torrey Canyon.

Built in the USA in 1959, Torrey

Canyon had an initial load

capacity of 60,000 tons. Later,

she was enlarged to a monster

120,000 tons in a Japanese

shipyard. Powered by a single

engine and propeller drive train,

her helm reactions were mind-

numbingly ponderous: she took

a tardy five miles to stop and

roughly a minute to turn through

20° of compass bearing at her

cruising speed of 17 knots.

By 1967, she was owned by

a subsidiary of Union Oil and

registered in Liberia. For her

fateful voyage, she was chartered

to BP with an Italian crew. Her

navigation aids included a

standard system of the day, which

incorporated an autopilot with

a bridge-located three-position

lever that gave full autopilot

The former RNLI lifeboat, Guy And Clare Hunter,

as she looks today – still in fine condition