In pursuance of Object (b) of the club rules the Secretary wrote to all members

on 3rd April 1954:

‘Dear Members

I shall be very glad if you will let me have

any news of ocean voyaging in small craft

which may be of interest to members. I also

require such Information for the Club

records.

Ann Davison has very kindly presented to

the Club the red ensign which she wore aboard

Felicity Ann during the voyage to New York.

She is busy writing another book and plans to

return to New York in May and carry on with

the voyage in little Felicity Ann which she

left at City Island.

Bill Howell sails shortly in the 50ft

steel ketch Goodewind for the States. The

yacht is owned by Dr. Laws who has entered

her for the Bermuda Race. As far as I know

she is the only British entry*.

Victor Clark, who is on his way round the

world in the 34ft. ketch Solace, is now at

Kingston, Jamaica. He plans to leave Panama

early in May.

The Commodore tells me that he is trying to

track down a remarkable voyage which was made

across the N. Atlantic in 1932 by Miss Anna

Cedarblom, a young Swedish lady. The voyage

was made single-handed in a 15ft launch with

an outboard engine and calls were made at

Lerwick (Shetland Islands}, the Faeroes and

Iceland. From West Greenland the boat is

believed to have been shipped back to Sweden.

*Records don’t indicate whether they took part in the race, but it looks doubtful

as a Dr Small qualified for the OCC in the same boat that year with a voyage

from Cork to the Azores and back).

59

I hope that my next news bulletin will be

more informative, but please remember that I

am dependent upon you for information.

Yours sincerely’

Although this was first referred to as the Bulletin, it was clearly the start of the

Newsletter, but wasn’t given that title for another two years. It was realised

from the very beginning that the Newsletter, in whatever form, was the only

tangible contact that many members had with the running of the Club. Indeed,

also from the outset, the few grumbles recorded were that it was poor return

for the money. The Secretary was always at pains to emphasise that the

Newsletter was only as good as the news he received, and he constantly cajoled

members to send him information. It was also inevitable that, with so relatively

few members sending news, the more vocal and interesting got more than their

share of publicity. One or two faithful correspondents got so great a coverage

that we are able to follow their progress in one issue after another, and it must

be said that some make dull reading.

As members responded the Secretary’s letters got progressively longer, still

typed on foolscap, some running to six pages of close type. He promised to try

and produce two a year and more or less succeeded. His early letters are a mine

of information and show how the Club was gradually taking shape worldwide.

Apart from routine matters they were largely about cruising members, but

rarely did he quote directly from letters, preferring to paraphrase. This must

have made for a lot of work as the likes of Bill Crealock were likely to send

him a ten page missive which had, perforce, to be severely edited.

In his second letter, in January 1955, he reported somewhat laconically on

the wreck of Victor Clark’s Solace on Palmerston Atoll, referring to Victor’s

‘bad luck in getting ashore’, when in fact half the starboard side had been torn

out of the boat. He also reported that seven OCC boats – Freelance, Havfruen,

Carrina, Revive, Yasme, Seal and Enchantra – had gathered in Antigua to

celebrate Christmas in the first year of the Club’s formation. Quite a good turnout

even by present day standards. He ended with the admonition that subscriptions

were due, £1 or $3.20. He was a devil for punishment, adding the postscript, ‘My

appetite for news of long voyages in small craft remains insatiable’.

Mostyn’s encouragement to report sailing news seems to have borne fruit as

his third letter, in October 1955, had almost five pages about members on the

high seas, despite his lament at the beginning that he had practically nothing to

report. He tells of the wreck of Solace at rather greater length than his previous

terse remarks:

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‘The weather deteriorated but as he was under

the lee felt quite safe, especially as the

natives assured him that the northerlies did

not commence until December. Commander Clark

and his Boy slept aboard. About midnight he

awoke hearing the surf louder and closer and

apparently abeam instead of ahead. The motion

too had changed. On deck, he found they had

swung round towards the reef, the wind having

backed 10 points; a nasty sea was running and

he now had a lee shore uncomfortably close.

In swinging, the anchor cable had fouled a

coral head and the ketch was snubbing badly.

The sea got up very quickly, probably owing

to the shelf and cliff edge formation. The

winch was almost pulled out of the deck and

the shaft bent, but Commander Clark managed

to get the cable off the drum and round the

Samson post. At that moment the cable parted

and they were in a smother of breakers at the

edge of the reef. At the critical moment of

reaching the reef he says ‘a seventh great

wave’ seemed to lift them on to the reef

instead of driving the ship against the cliff

edge, where they would have been match wood

within a few minutes, and sunk in six

fathoms. Successive seas flogged them across

the reef until they were about twenty yards

from the edge, and there they rested. It was

an awful night, blowing a gale, raining,

covered in spray, heeled over about 50

degrees, holed on the starboard side, the

cabin a chaos and flooded.

The next four weeks were spent in hauling

Solace across the reef, floating her in the

lagoon, hauling her up the beach and shoring

her up under the palm trees. The hole on her

starboard side measured 19 feet by 6 feet.’

It is interesting to note that he also reports at length on Bill Tilman even though

he had not yet become a member. Perhaps this was because he was an old

friend and sailing companion of Hum’s and they had designs to press him as

61

Solace at Porto Santo, soon after the start

of her three year circumnavigation

soon as he got home. Bill was setting off on the first of his several high latitude

voyages to facilitate his first love, scaling unclimbed peaks, which by then

were only to be found at the ends of the earth.

In February 1956 the Secretary headed his fourth letter, Ocean Cruising

Club Newsletter. There is no evidence that this was a conscious decision on

his part, or by the Committee, but the minutes of a meeting in October 1955

also allude to ‘The Newsletter’ so it appears that the name was arrived at

empirically. Nevertheless, the Newsletter continued to be laboriously typed and

hand duplicated by Mostyn, and faithfully kept the membership informed of the

progressively expanding numbers who were crossing the oceans. Indeed, there

seemed to have been a veritable explosion of deep-sea sailing in the two years

since the club had been formed, or was it just that, at last, there was an

organisation collecting this information whereas previously much had gone

unsung?

The Secretary had obviously got his tentacles, out as his reports came from

a great variety of sources. He noted that on 31 October 1955, ‘The United

Kingdom Radio’had reported that Yasme had left Panama for Tahiti the previous

day, though why the BBC should be interested in a small boat setting out across

the Pacific is not clear. He also quoted a paper cutting from Canada:

62

‘A Vancouver paper dated the 9th November

1955 gives some details of John Guzzwell and

his 18 footer Trekka in which he sailed

across from Victoria B.C. to Hawaii in 29

days.’

Mostyn goes on,

‘The paper suggests he may be the smallest

ever to sail to Hawaii from the west coast of

America. She was built by Guzzwell himself

and it took 18 months. He is going to New

Zealand and may then sail on to South Africa

where he once lived. Trekka looks like a

larger Sopranino, which was designed by

Laurent Giles and sailed out to the States by

Pat Ellam and Colin Mudie in 1951. Trekka is

rigged as a yawl and she must be

exceptionally fast.’

Trekka was in fact 20ft 6in overall, which does make her a bigger version of

Sopranino at a little under 20ft. She too was of Laurent Giles design.

There were regular updates on the movements of Bill Crealock and Ernest

Chamberlain, both Founder Members, who had bought and restored the old

105ft gaff schooner Gloria Maris in Newport Beach. They converted her to

Bermudan rig, putting a 110ft pole mast in her for ‘easy short-handed sailing’.

At the time of Mostyn’s report they were crossing the Pacific with a party of

scientists, in search of poisonous sea animals from which to extract the venom

so as to make an antidote. Bill eventually settled in California where he practised

as a yacht designer, drawing the well-known Westsail series and later the famous

Crealock 37, a sturdy cruising boat still very popular in the US. Bill has been in

and out of the Club several times as his membership was allowed to lapse, but

it is gratifying to learn that, on hearing of the Jubilee, at the age of 84 he has

applied to rejoin.

Not all reported passages were as exotic or successful as Bill and Ernest’s. In

his action-packed Newsletter of 9 August 1956 Mostyn retold at length the trials

and tribulations of new members David Beard and Gordon Auchterlonie,

much of which is worth quoting:

‘Mr. Beard and Gordon Auchterlonie left

Lowestoft on the 25th October 1955 in Skaffie

and arrived at Madeira on the 1st December

63

(their qualifying passage). Skaffie is a 20ft

Bermudian sloop with a beam of 7ft 3in. They

had bad weather most of the way and were

dismasted off Cape Finisterre, losing their

dinghy, their engine being flooded and put

out of action. They carried on under jury rig

and it took them nine days against head winds

to cover the last 240 miles into Funchal.

They made the West Indies safely but ran into

serious trouble later when making for the

Canal Zone. A hundred miles from Grenada

their rudder split down the centre and with

only half the blade they found it almost

impossible to steer except down wind. They

decided to try and make Curaçao.

When endeavouring to get to the south of

Bonaire Island they were blown and washed

inshore and being unable to tack finally

struck the coral and the boat stranded. They

scrambled ashore and after an all night walk,

found help at the town of Kralendijk. With a

bulldozer and many willing hands Skaffie was

dragged ashore and transported across to the

west coast of the island on a lorry. She was

pretty badly damaged. She had five new planks

and part of her keel replaced. Mr Beard says

they cannot speak too highly of the Dutch

Authorities for all their help and of the

inhabitants for their assistance and the many

necessities given to enable them to continue

their voyage.

They left Bonaire Island on the 2nd April

and made good runs until the 5th, when the

wind increased and the sea got up. They were

then about one hundred miles from the

Columbian coast. The weather continued to

deteriorate and they rode to a sea-anchor. On

the 6th this carried away; at the same time

they shipped a ‘terrific sea’ and Mr. Beard

was washed overboard. He swam back although

he had on oilskins. The rudder also broke

again. They bailed out and hove to with just

64

a corner of the mainsail set, but with the

wind still increasing and only a bit of

rudder left, things looked black. On the 7th

they again shipped a big sea which put them

over on their beam ends with the mast in the

water, the cockpit flooded and the cabin

became a shambles. They thought for some

seconds it was the end, then Skaffie ‘came up

slowly’. The dinghy had broken adrift and

soon broke up completely. The chronometer had

been thrown out of its case and had stopped.

They were swamped once more but on the 8th

the weather improved. They rigged a jury

rudder with a boom and floor boards and

sailed on, finally arriving at Colon on the

19th April after being becalmed and almost

driven ashore on the islands south of

Manzanilla Point. Their navigation for the

last part had been mostly guesswork – no

chronometer and a shark had taken the rotor

off the log line. ...

I am sorry to say that after all their

efforts they have had to give up for the

present.’

The Mr Beard is of course, David Beard, still a member and now our Port

Officer Brisbane.

Ben Carlin hadn’t been idle since his reported departure the previous year in his

amphibious jeep, Half Safe:

‘He reached Hong Kong on the 6th May. The

London-Calcutta ‘passage’ was fairly

straightforward, the English Channel and the

Bosphorus like mill ponds. Heat and several

broken steering arms in Persia delayed him.

Mrs Ben Carlin accompanied him in a small 5

cwt. van with spares and supplies. This van

did very good work in Persia and covered

several extra hundreds of miles getting the

steering arms repaired many miles away from

where Half Safe was stranded. They did not

65

arrive in Calcutta until the 15th July 1955,

too late to continue their journey to

Australia under their own steam. They

therefore shipped the jeep and themselves to

Fremantle, arriving on the 9th October, and

motored across the continent to Sydney to

keep some business appointments. Later they

motored to Melbourne and Ben shipped with

Half Safe back to Calcutta and Mrs Carlin

came back to Lebanon, where she now is.

He eventually left on the 19th February

and ‘steamed’ across the Bay of Bengal alone

and picked up his new partner, Harry Hanley,

at Akyab. Together they drove across the

rough mountain track to Proune thence down

the main road to Rangoon. They then set off

down the Rangoon River, across the Gulf and

up the river for 40 miles to Kyondo. There,

after he says, ‘much fun’, the 39 miles over

the mountains to the Siamese border took

eleven hours solid driving. He marvels how

Half Safe survived this pre-war road, which

is now a ‘giant’s rosary’ of granite

boulders. The temperature in the jeep was 146

degrees.

The next stretch of 60 miles was almost as

hard and took them one and a half days:

impossible gradients up which the jeep had to

winch herself a dozen times. Bangkok was

reached on 26th March. Then on into Cambodia

through Angkor Wat to Pnom Penh and entered

Saigon on the 12th April. Stayed another

week then drove north to Nha Trang. Here

they went afloat again and steamed the 275

miles to Tourane. The passage from Tourane

to Hong Kong was 530 sea miles which they

covered in 79 hours (sic) arriving on

Sunday 6th May. Ben says constant head

winds slowed them down and they spent one