The clipper-ship myth

IN THE GOLDEN AGE of clipper ships there was a lot of boasting about their speed. Indeed, even today those of us who have habitually plodded around at 5 knots under sail are impressed by the numbers.

Under perfect circumstances, the clippers recorded some remarkable speeds, ranging from 18 knots by the Donald McKay to 22 knots by the Sovereign of the Seas in 1854.

But when we’re sitting in the cockpit, sawing away at the tiller to keep her going straight before a fresh following breeze and thinking what it would be like to be splitting the sea at 22 knots, there is something to take into consideration: those clipper speeds were not the norm. They achieved them only for short times in exceptional conditions.

You and I can maintain 5 knots until the seacows come home, but a clipper needed to be lightly loaded, for a start, to achieve record speeds. Her bottom had to be smooth and clean, and she needed special conditions.

Ideally, the wind was strong from aft, a wind that would create long, fast swells to power her on her way, and it’s not often that this happens, because of a host of factors including land nearby and contrary currents.

The oldtimers knew that a clipper captain might spend a lifetime at sea without experiencing all the perfect conditions needed for his ship to reach her best speed for a short period.

In fact, if you look at some of the times the clippers took to sail from New York to San Francisco via Cape Horn, some 15,000 miles, you’ll note that their average speeds were nothing like the fastest speeds their passenger agents boasted about.

Most of them took about 200 days over this passage, but the Flying Cloud held the record for more than 100 years, from 1854 to 1989, with a time of 89 days and 8 hours.

It took a French maxi-catamaran to show how it’s done these days. The Gitana did the trip in 43 days at an average speed of 15.88 knots (including a five-day wait to round Cape Horn). That’s less than half the time it took the fastest clipper ship, so the Flying Cloud couldn’t have averaged much more than 7 or 8 knots.

Therefore, next time you’re bowling along at 5 or 6 knots in your Tupperware cruiser you needn’t in any way feel inferior. No matter what they said, no matter what claims they made, a clipper ship would only be going a couple of knots faster than you. You might want to raise a glass of good cheer as she crawls past.

Today’s Thought
Three things only are well done in haste: flying from the plague, escaping quarrels, and catching flies.
— H. G. Bohn, Handbook of Proverbs

Boaters’ Rules of Thumb, #215
Because of the difficulty of measuring wave heights from a small sailboat at sea, the rule of thumb is that the real sea is probably not much more than half as high, or as steep, as it looks at its worst moment. The only reasonable way to estimate the height of the waves is to wait until you are truly in the trough, midway between crests. Then most crests will be even with the horizon in all directions. Your perception of sea height at that brief moment will be untainted by illusion.

Tailpiece
Two cannibals were chatting over lunch.
“You know,” said the first one, “I can’t stand my mother-in-law.”
“Gee, no problem,” said the second, “just eat the noodles then.”

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