This week Sable Island became the Canada’s newest national park. Almost three hundred kilometers out into the Atlantic off the coast of Nova Scotia, it is a scimitar shaped sandbar which seems to have no business being there at all. It is 44 km long but never more than 2 km wide. It also happens to be on the great circle route, the shortest sailing distance from Europe to New England. Even in good weather, the low-lying island is hard to see and, as it lies where the Labrador current collides with the warm water of the Gulf Stream, is often shrouded in fog. The island has been the graveyard of at least 350 ships since it was discovered around 1520. The first documented ship to come ashore on Sable Island was Sir Humphrey Gilbert‘s flagship Delight in 1583. The last wreck was the yacht Merrimac in 1999. The island has earned it’s nickname, “the Graveyard of the Atlantic.”
To see a map of the ships wrecked on the island click here – The Graveyard of the Atlantic.
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Usually downrigging a schooner involves lots of coiling, carrying, hauling, the breaking down of shackles and turnbuckles, and depending on the rig, attempting to free up the top mast so that it can be lowered gently to the deck, rather than dropping it like an unguided missile. The last time I helped downrig a schooner, I spent hours in the cross-trees, helping those who knew far better what they were doing than I, and generally enjoying the view on a brisk Fall day. A rendezvous at the bar that afternoon ended the day most satisfactorily.
Those of us of a certain age, who were active in merchant shipping, remember the tanker industry in the 1980s. And none too fondly. After a period of rising charter rates and robust new construction, the market effectively collapsed in the 80s, resulting in a large fleet of laid up tankers. Some new ships steamed straight from the shipyard to lay-up. It is too soon to tell if conditions will turn as dark as they were thirty years ago, but the signs are not encouraging.
In August, we 
The future of the oldest, just barely surviving, composite clipper ship in the world, the 
Jeffrey Allison is a fascinating gentlemen. Now 73, from Middleton Tyas in the UK, he only started sailing when he retired from a career in engineering. Since then, he has sailed across the Atlantic six times, as well transiting the Panama Canal, and sailing the Pacific, Indian and Arctic Oceans. He has just returned from a 40 day circumnavigation of the Arctic. Allison and his crew, Australian crewmate Katherine Brownlie, 28, are the first to circumnavigate the Arctic in a clockwise direction. Two yachts previously circumnavigated the Arctic counter-clockwise in 2010.
We are rapidly approaching the bi-centennial of the 
