Report from a Russian participant

Hi Marianne,

A report I wrote for the conference of my old sailing club in the US - SCOW (www.scow.org). Once again, thank you for a great weekend of sailing.

Best wishes, Sergey Tagashov

Ahoy SCOW!
Has anyone one of you SCOW-members ever wondered what it would be like to sail an actual scow? Or to be exact a "schouw", since that's exactly how the Dutch spell it. Well, I did wonder and my curiousity (and a bit of luck) led me to Holland, where these boats are still built in large numbers. Originally these were fishing vessels, but now they've become a local sailboat of choice. They are very well adapted to the extremely shallow waters of the Waddenzee or the Frisian Sea, as it is called on some British charts. If you want to sail one you can find the details (links and pictures, too) at this site: https://www.scheepswijs.nl/eng/index.html.

The skipper and instructor - Marianne van der Linden - speaks excellent English and will gladly teach you the tricks of traditional gaff rigging, navigating the extreme tidal waters along the Dutch coast. You will also experience a glimpse of the old-time sailing with wooden rigging, and not much more then a compass and a chart to guide you...

What follows is an impression from my own 2 day mini-adventure, so if you have time - read on: Visiting "Boot" - Continental Europe's largest annual boatshow held in Dusseldorf for 38 years in row, I walked into the chartering/sailing tourism part of the exhibit and to my surprise found out that the Dutch still build their traditional gaff-rigged flatbottom schouw's and lemsteraaken - the boats I knew from the paintings dating back to the 1700's. Lovely vessels with a curved gaff, wooden rigging, lots of wooden blocks, three sails, and a charecteristic "streched doughnut" shape. I got excited, but a bit concerned about sailing an unknown rig in unknown waters, so I started looking for a school that would introduce me to the boat. Luckily, on my way out I picked up an issue of the British sailing magazine "Classical boat" - there I found the "ScheepsWijs sailing school".

A few weeks later I stepped on board the "Deining" (loosely translates as "Wave action", I think) - a 10.5 meter (about 35') 10 ton metal scow with a draft of .... only 90 cm (less then 3 feet!). While recently built out of metal, it was painted black, carried wooden mast and bow-sprit, some of the lines were still good old hemp; the sail was attached to the mast and boom with rings of line (I do not remember the proper term for those), and all the blocks were wood (sorry - no jam cleets:)), much like 200 years ago. Equipment included a compass, a diesel engine and a very simple GPS which we switched on once in two days of sailing to fix our position (and even that out of pure lazyness - we could've easily acquired a fix from the sevaral navigational aids in sight). The main cabin was heated by...a wood stove, of course, with the galley having several rows of clay tiles on the bulkhead. One could not be mistaken - he was aboard a Dutch vessel rooted in sailing tradition. We sailed out of Harlingen Haven - an old port North-East of Amsterdam (about 3 hours by train from the Amsterdam Airport) with canals and locks running along the main streets. Upon request the harbour master raises the bridge for the masted vessels to get out of port and you see a vast greyish area all the way to the horizon - not quite sure where it's water, and where - the sky. The Waddenzee is shielded from the rough waters of the North sea, so the conditions are a bit like on the Cheesapeake, however, the winds are much stronger and the temperatures are lower, of course. (We sailed in Bft 5-6 winds, that's something between 17 and 25 knots, but curiously I didn't see any waves higher then 3 feet). The water is whitish-grey - lots of sand eternally circulated by currents and tides, I guess. It is also extremely shallow - large areas rise 2+ feet ABOVE sea level at low tide. You can see a stunning "birth of dry land" event every six hours - where there was water - land slowly emerges with birds and other animals (like seals) sitting on this newly acquired soil... Navigating such waters outside of the heavily marked and narrow main channels is a constant excersize in counting time, tidal directions and force, wind strength and direction. There are also numerous fishing net poles and just shallows to make your life fun. To make it extra fun and to bring you back a couple of hundred years how about... no depthsounder - you just use a 9 foot colored pole to check depth in the shallows... Working it for 10-20 minutes (e.g. when crossing a shallow) is a great fitness exersize :)! A boat navigating such waters can not have a keel of course, hence the traditional flat bottom design with leeboards attached to both sides of the boat. Those work like a centerboard of a Flying Scot or a swing-keel, with the difference that it is lowered from the lee side. Each time you tack you have to shift a leeboard, as well as tighten and loosen the backstays on the respective sides of the boat - a gaff rig would not allow for a backstay reaching to the transom - you've got two of them along the sides instead and you need to let loose the leeward backstay for the boom to travel normally. So, as you can see, there is a bit more work and coordination involved. The boat also had just a simple tiller, so at 10 tons she would not allow improper sail trim - you could not force it to go anywhere by just pushing it. On the other hand, when trimmed properly at certain angles to the wind the boat would sail with hardly any need of steering - she just sticks to the course, as if the was an auto-pilot engaged. Traditional sail attachment (i.e. no groove or thread to run a sail through anywhere) surprised me with its flexibility - a combination of reef points and hailyards allowed us to have a huge sail area or a really small one with the mainsail being a fumbled roundish piece hanging sort of in the center between the gaff, the boom, and the mast. Shallow bottoms allow these boats to safely run aground and lie on dry land (leeboards raised) waiting for the tide to come in. All in all it was an amazing experience observing "how it all used to work back then" and also learning some finer points of sailing, sail trim, and boat handling. By the way, as many of you probably know, historically the Netherlands have independently developed seamanship techniques and boat designs, so there are no correlations with the British sailing terminology - all boat parts and rigging have their original names in Dutch starting from stuurboord and bakboord (that's starboard and port, of course). For me, being from Russia - a nation that borrowed it's sailing terminology, lock, stock, and barrel, from the Dutch, it was really fun to use my own language for the sailing terms and to see that they have stayed the same since the times of Peter the Great and my Dutch shipmates could still understand those...

In less then 6 hours of sailing, covered by salty spray, I completely forgot where I was from, what did I do before, or had to do after - I was in heaven... or darn close to it :)

Best wishes and safe seas to all,
Sergey Tagashov
Ex-SCOW member and on-line SCOW ghost :)