the things I do for stories

[kaigou]

I'm not dead, just been focused on a major project (went live yesterday, whee), and in the meantime, realized that I couldn't exactly frame an argument between characters over the best (oceanic) route to take if I didn't actually know the timeframes it'd take to get from one place to another. And then I realized that I didn't even know if the between-island route I'd drawn was even possible. I mean, there's the straits of Bosporus (the inspiration for the route) but it's also an insane strait with a 90' turn in the middle, and I'm writing the age of sail.

I ended up calling my best friend's husband, who's been sailing since he was only yay-tall, did time in the navy, and went on to do lots with tall-masted ships. I'd been trying to research ships, but most of the stuff out there seems to assume you already have a clue. (Shrouds? stays? sheeves? euphroes? what the hell?) That was an hour's chat on Sunday and my head is still reeling.

Not the least of which is getting over the not-so-mild terror at the sheer thought of ever being on a freaking flight control of an aircraft carrier -- not exactly at water-line, here -- and having waves so big they're crashing INTO the flight control windows. HELLO.

As if that wasn't enough, he then described going through Hell Gate (a stretch before Long Island Sound where two rivers and the ocean and a few other rivers all meet in one place and you end up with eddies, whirlpools, horrible mixed-up currents and let's not forget the submerged rocks). I had unintentionally mapped out basically a mix pretty much identical to Hell Gate's setup, but I've also been through a similar one, too, in Sydney. The conflux of ocean tides and the multiple river-mouths in Sydney harbor create a wacky spot in the middle where all the currents meet, and even the massive Staten-Island-sized ferry we were on got tossed about like a cork. The ship had several minutes of serious rapid tilt (about 45' in one direction, and then 45' in the opposite direction and then back again in a heartbeat). K commented that if you're ever going to get seasick, you'll definitely do it going through Hell Gate or similar. Since I didn't even feel queasy on that ferry, I felt a little better about it, but I won't lie and say I wasn't absolutely petrified all the same.

I don't know why I keep ending up writing about sailors, when the very notion of being over water where I can't see the bottom puts a fear greater into me than just about anything else I can name.

Comments

[kaigou]

I may, no, will probably take you up on that! At least I already got the worst stupid questions out of the way. I mean, I've known K for, uh, twenty-something years now and I never before bothered to ask (which surprises me, since I usually ask about everything if I'm in the room with an expert, not because I'll always do anything with the information but just because I like to learn new stuff no matter how esoteric). At least now I do know what stays and shrouds are, and the gist of how you'd get a ship through a narrows like the Bosporus (at least the general idea of it).

What K didn't know a lot about was Chinese junk ships, or the purposes behind some of their stylistic designs. Like the way the junk bows frequently look like the bows of the little fishermen chaseboats, the ones where the front is flat and scoops up, so you can drag it onto the beach and it won't tip. But from schema of most junk ships, there is some kind of a skeg and the deep-sea ones aren't flat-bottomed (which makes sense), yet the bow is this strange flat-nosed, often looking divided, as if it has two prows instead of one.

As K pointed out, in boat design, everything exists because it addresses some existing issue. IOW, like with the Indonesian merchant ships and their incredibly long pointy high-reaching bows, someone said, "the seas are really rough," and came up with something to address that. Function absolutely before form, which means that there must have been a function that led to the chinese trading ships having that split bow.

That's the kind of thing that puzzles me, above and beyond some of the more basic technical aspects. I mean, in a story, I don't have to give the entire spiel since it'd bore the reader and it's not like I'm writing a sailing manual. But if I take a look at a junk ship and think, "what is THAT thing" or "why on earth does it look like that?" then I figure so would at least one new-to-ocean character. It's a way to provide expertise for ship-familiar characters without having to get purely technical to convince the reader... so long as the expertise I put in the character's mouth actually is something expert! Hence the problem.

A more technical puzzlement is ships at harbor. I can't find pictures of Asian (pre-steam/power) harbors, so I'm left to guess that the piers were similar to western. But without tug boats, how do you get the ship docked at a pier perpendicular to the shore? Parallel, that's easier to visualize, but perpendicular raises the question of: now that you've docked, how do you back out?

(Some of the smaller junk ships did apparently have sculling oars that could be dropped from the stern. I'm guessing for very short stints of rowing, like maybe in/out of the docks, or for turning in tight quarters like battles or straits. I've read things that seem to imply this would also be true on larger junk ships, especially the coastal ones, but I'm not sure whether I'm misreading the implying or if the implying is what I'm reading.)

heh. I'm sure I'll think of more, but it's hard to ask intelligent questions when you aren't even sure yet what's what.

[thistleburr]

I don't really know anything about Chinese junks either - sorry. I sail on a 17th century square-rigger. I wouldn't have any idea how much of that information also applies to junks.

[kaigou]

From what Mr Kraehe understood, junk-rigging has enough in common with, uhm, Bermudan? (ugh now I can't remember) rigging that he could give me a rough explanation of the different types. Although I think Bermudan is triangular sails, while junk sails are more trapezoidal. But anyway... it's fine, it's not like there are a lot of tall junk ships, and it's certainly not nearly as big for sailors here in the West.

(There are remaining junk ships in the East, but from the ones I've found, they've either been modified heavily to take an engine, OR they've been turned into floating hotels and heavily modified in the interior so there's little to nothing that resembles the original interiors. Finding info about how ships look, on the inside, is the damnedest hard thing, and when you add in "chinese junk" it makes that stupid needle in the proverbial haystack easier to find in comparison. Just seems like there's more interest in the West in some kind of at least attempt at accuracy for education/demonstration purposes, while in the East there's lip service paid for tourists but very little in the way of education outside of one or two examples -- and the Princess Taiping was destroyed on her way back to Taiwan, or else she'd probably be a great example of a working merchant ship.)

Wait, 17th cen square rigger? I was under the impression those fell by the wayside by the 16th cen or so, at least in terms of the big East India clippers. Where were square-riggers still being used, in the west? The only place it's been highlighted in my reading is that Japanese retained single-masted, square-riggers pretty much up to the arrival of the black ships in the 1850s or so -- but Japanese use was almost entirely coastal during their closed centuries, using ships for fishing and ferrying and a little patrolling. Not a lot of interaction with the outside world to have need to innovate, unlike the big Portuguese, Dutch, and British companies that were in competitive neck-and-neck from west-to-east. My guess is that given K's lecture about function (not form!), then there must be a function for square rigger that'd make it preferable in some circumstance. But what circumstance is that (if you know)?

[thistleburr]

Yeah, a junk rig has some stuff in common with a Bermuda rig. They have a lot of unique attributes though. And yes a Bermuda rigged ship has triangular sails without battens.

Yes, square riggers were still very much in use in the 1600s - even into the 1900s. Some of the last commercially-functioning tall ships were square rigged. A good example of this is the Peking. A square rig makes it so you can stack sails on top of each other which increases the sail area you can get, but a fore and aft rigged ship can sail into the wind better. A lot of ships combine both to get some of the advantages of each.

[kaigou]

And more sail = more speed, right? (Well, up to the breakeven point, since I'd guess there's a point of diminishing returns.) So square rigger benefit is that you can go much faster as long as you have the wind right behind you or very close to it, while a bermuda or junk rig means you might not go as fast but you can take advantage of iffy wind directions that would leave a square-rigged stuck?

[kaigou]

Yup, the whole function before form, which would logically lead to doing whatever mix and match is needed to get the results you want. I got a basic introduction from K about hull shapes and construction methods, and whatnot, though obviously my new iota of knowledge is probably little more than a nail's weight compared to the tonnage out there to know. (But I did learn about the types of wood used for nails, and weight lines for how much you can fill up a ship, and nifty tidbits, which is exactly the little things you need for a story.)

I just recall that there was something about wind being stronger the higher you go, hence the value of very tall masts with the multiple sails, the stackable sails being easier with square rigging. Erm, I think? But also exponentially more difficult to handle and/or requiring a much larger crew, because there's more moving parts. But as Mr Kraehe pointed out, it's very similar to what I already know from driving cars or riding motorcycles -- that a damn good driver in a lesser car will beat a mediocre driver in a top-notch car, hands down. A highly-skilled crew can do more & get more out of an otherwise unremarkable ship than any mediocre or unskilled crew could do in the bestest speediest design o' ship. While a ship's own design introduces limitations, there's a huge amount of play for the skill and knowledge of the crew itself.

[thistleburr]

This is the Peking, a steel-hulled square-rigged sailing ship that was still being used commercially for trade in the 1920s.

[kaigou]

It looks formidable.

The hardest part about ships is that there's rarely a sense of scale in the images. Either the drawings don't have people, or the photos aren't quality enough to see anything human-sized to get an idea. Probably doesn't help that the ships I've been on are such a vast range -- I've been on an aircraft carrier in dry-dock and that's just so damn BIG it makes your brain hurt -- and I've been on the Alexandria, a little schooner that lived in DC for a number of years, which was a cute little thing with a puffy bow (that had some kind of particular name I can't recall now for the shape of its hull).

When I mentioned going through the Sydney Harbor on the ferry, K assured me I was in no danger. I said, I knew I wasn't! (Thousands of people commute on the ferry daily, so I was hoping that meant the trip had been tested quite thoroughly before I came along. Or something.) But I was thinking, damn, the first people to sail into this bay, how did they make it? Did they just whack up against the waves and get knocked over? No, K told me, the explorer ships tended to be about the size of the ferry I rode. I think there's still a bruise on the underside of my chin from that part of the conversation, because I've never actually seen a tall ship next to a modern ferry to see the comparison in scale. It makes sense -- to have to be that big, for major exploration -- because you'd be carrying a huge crew and all their food and water etc, but still. It's just not been part of my world (to see one against the other, and have a sense of scale) so I'm still a little 'waaaahhh' about that revelation. I mean, to me, that's huge.

Okay, not aircraft-carrier-huge, but aircraft carrier is kind of like its own planet. Anything longer than two football fields that can still go 30 knots is just completely outside the realm of comparable. An anomaly. I'm still back on thinking of 200 feet in terms of my living room times ten. If I were writing a story with aircraft carriers, I'd probably have to think in terms of my entire neighborhood... times ten.

[thistleburr]

You should probably watch the movie Around Cape Horn :)

I agree that it's difficult to understand the scale of ships without stepping on deck.

[kathmandu]

My experience is all on very small boats (as in, one person could row it in a pinch), but isn't the last-resort method of getting away from a perpendicular-to-shore pier always "step on, cast off, and wait for the tide to take you out"?

[kaigou]

I know the current made a big difference in crew -- we'd drift along quite quickly, but then, even nine people in a shell isn't that much weight. But then, one of my mandatory Stupid Question points was "if the maps say the current goes in this direction, then how do you get home?" on the assumption that current = wind. Ahem, apparently not.

(One major plus for K is that if nothing else, in all the years I've known him, he has never once made me feel like an idiot for asking a stupid question, and never lost patience with me for it, either. So I feel pretty comfortable asking stupid questions, because he'll give me the answer, without dissing me for the ignorance.)

[thistleburr]

A large tall ship catches a lot of wind even with the sails furled. Even with the tide - even with two motors - it didn't help us get off the dock when the wind was blowing us back onto it. Also a lot of the time, tall ships have a deep draft and have to be really careful about how they leave a dock, to make sure they stay in the channel and don't run themselves aground, so they can't just generally try to go "out."