Jute, bamboo and scrap.

Taratari, Mastoris and Sampans.

Capucine, pure gold, second post.

Several years ago I was ‘between boats’ having sold one and not been ready to buy another one because my partner and I had recently bought an old Cornish miners cottage and so all of my available funds were going into that ; I did however spend most of my evenings searching the internet for interesting, unusual and then simply cheap boats. Where that took me from was my relatively small Frances 26 via no boat to the little Hunter Liberty cat ketch ; and I think the most fun I had had with a boat up until then.

During my time of not owning a boat I did still run my sailing blog but had to find other things to write about than my own adventures and a very early piece of mine was a cover of a story about Breton sailor Capucine Trochet and her adventure with a very unusual looking boat called Taratari. My post was entirely based on Capucine’s own blog and I think her own photographs because I had none of my own – as a post it wasn’t exactly a cut and paste but the next best or worst thing to it. One thing though…..I thought it would be pretty neat to at least make contact with Ms Trochet and maybe even get an online interview and thus some original material.

What I did was to write out an introduction to myself and my blog, stressing that I was a small boat sailor trying to make it as a blogger and basically….could I ask some questions. But….what I did next was try to be dead clever and instead of just sending it in plain English I did a Google translate and sent the French version instead. Several days later I received a polite but completely baffled reply from Capucine herself that basically said to forward my questions in plain English because the Google translate program had totally mashed my English into something that made no sense whatsoever – I was slightly reminded of this problem when I was reviewing responses to my re-post of the same piece after I posted it again on the Sailing Facebook page ; a French, I presume, poster had responded in French but when I used the Facebook translation button the results were unreadable !

Here’s the original blog post btw. https://dirtywetdog.co.uk/2019/04/19/la-capucine-pure-gold/

Brittany 2019.

I’m happy to say that I am completely incompetent in both spoken and written French which is entertaining given how much I enjoyed actually sailing in Brittany for 110 days during my last trip there. However, just as with my home life where I go from one end of the day to t’other without speaking to a single person much the same was true of my time in Brittany where my longest conversation was something along the lines of ‘hello miss ‘ and then ‘one coffee (grand creme) and a pain au chocolat please’. The first time I walked up from where I was moored, at Paluden quay to the supermarket at Llanilis and actually had to ask the checkout lady there a question seemed to cause a reaction of actual panic in said check out lady…..to this day I have no idea what I said.

When asked about my best moments in France during that trip my answer is the time I was in the same village at lunch time on a market day and successfully asked a street vendor not only for a portion of the dish sizzling away on the brazier but also what was in it…..saucisse, potate, ognon and les herbes basically….so that I could have a go at making it myself. In all truth i’m a crap communicator because i’m basically an extreme introvert so when I have to or had to communicate in my work life I tended to do it professionally rather than as a natural.

It’s basically all my fault because I could try just that little bit harder and at times in France I did – my excuse though is that I had not one but three awful French teachers in succession, so bad in fact that I genuinely swore extreme violence on the last one if I had ever run into him once I actually left school.

Anyway and onwards.

Life in France…..favourite cafe in Chateaulin,

Post re-posted and the various reactions.

Last week, in blog time, we celebrated my 65th birthday with a day out to Mylor – lunch and a scout of the access roads and the public slipway there, then when we got home I thought to make my small contribution to international women’s day by re-posting my piece about Capucine Trochet and her voyage with Taratari. I thought that it might get me a few bonus views which would bring my stats up a bit but I was completely stunned when it got more that 500 on the first day and on top of that some 1,000 positive reactions so far. The downside was that alongside generally positive comments the post got what I can only describe as a ‘troll’ poster who I think had a great time doubling down and down and then, as trolls often do, declaring that he was leaving the thread with backs generally up and noses thoroughly out of joint.

Me….I spent most of the next day getting cross with my trailer problems and felt that I needed to write a well argued comeback to matey-troll so I spent several hours working on that with the intention of using that as the follow up post to my original piece. By the end of that day though I realized two important things ; firstly that there was no way that I could or would want to put that post on the Sailing page because i’d had to drag up every negative aspect of gender politics – not only disallowed on the page but deeply toxic. The second thing I realized was that I was dancing to the troll’s tune just by having to respond in that way and that’s simply not the way I choose to behave on the internet.

In a recent post I said that i’m not a writer and using Stephen Fry’s description of blogs being ‘graffiti with punctuation’ I proudly call myself a graffiti artist. However, even a graffiti artist has the choice of spray painting willies on the subway wall or creating art of some kind – in other words that I choose to be a positive and usually polite contributor to the internet rather than a troll just out for his own pleasure of causing a ruck and then clearing off. Regular readers will know that I follow Jordan Peterson’s trait psychology work closely and recently he moved on from ‘normative’ traits to the ‘dark’ traits like narcissism, manipulation and Machiavellian like behaviour especially as related to the internet and ‘trolling’.

So, we all got trolled and I wasted a few hours of writing time.

The positive part of the weekend was researching, once again, the other character in the story about Taratari – her original builder Corentin (Coco) de Chatelperron….below.

Today, I think that there are two great stories here and when I wrote the original piece I only told the one – or less than half of the whole : I told it on the basis of what Capucine Trochet did with Taratari but rather skipped over the fact that the boat had been built by Corentin (Coco), that he had actually then sailed the boat from the bay of Bengal to the south of France and after that had gone back to work on a new project. In retrospect I focused on Capucine’s story because I come from a healthcare background and Capucine overcame some serious medical problems and by all accounts was coping with a lot of pain while she was refitting Taratari.

Our man Corentin (Coco) seems totally taken by the idea of building boats in as low-tech a way as possible and in locally available materials – thus the new project boat is a Sampan style craft with a hull built mostly of Jute fiber and with spars that look like Bamboo. Just to say that in my other great interest other than sailing (Bushcraft) both Bamboo and natural fibers are highly respected as structural materials.

Rather than me giving you a long interpretation of Coco’s new vessel, it’s design. materials and so on it might be better for you the reader go take a look at any of the video series about the boat first and Coco’s life and interest in trying to be a sailing nomad…..but a very low-tech one. Thus far the only video’s I can find are all in spoken French which is a bit of a problem given my story so far except that it’s still possible to work out what is going on because it’s the film footage which does most of the work.

Here for example.

My thoughts on Taratari, the Sampan and low-tech construction.

When I first saw photographs and film footage of Taratari I really didn’t understand it except that it looked like an over grown sea kayak, had almost no space below and certainly no physical comfort and on top of that it seemed both tender in a blow and extremely wet. Today I know that the boat is based on a ‘Mastori’ which is a form of fishing boat native to the bay of Bengal and, like the later boat completely outside of my experience ; I guess that as with most readers and watchers here I only really know native boats when they are native to the mostly northern hemisphere so anything outside that can look pretty strange.

The original Mastori, doesn’t seem to have ever been intended for oceanic sailing and the modifications made are all features we see in the typical northern hemisphere boats that we are familiar with ; the tall Bermudan rig for example and the twin leeboards. I have no idea about Taratari’s stability – she is very narrow so the form stability will be low and would then rely on internal ballast – my thought was first that the ‘modern’ rig really doesn’t match the hull form and the second that being such a wet ride would only work in warm water because the driver is basically wet all the time and that would be hypothermia country in the northern hemisphere.

I actually worked on the idea for a project like this one except that the form I chose to start with was more Sharpie than sea kayak – in fact my starting point was Commodore Munroe’s ‘Egret’ but as modified along the lines of Phil Bolger and Ruehl Parker to deal with some of Egret’s shortcomings. Even so, Egret is also a warm water and shallow seas boat originally intended for running shallow bars on the Florida coast and not going to windward in the English channel in a steep (and cold) channel chop. That way of thinking though eventually took me to the little Liberty which is, I believe. a much more effective (and comfortable) sea boat and would do the same job as the Sharpie/Egret design.

Of side interest I actually came across an Egret replica while I was in Brittany and would have loved to speak with it’s owner…..even given my appalling French. I’m still fascinated by Egret style Sharpie’s and obsessively keep a file of every new Sharpie photograph that I find.

Where it all took me.

Iv’e said several times that my understanding of boats and sailing comes from a very narrow and very modern focus – that being the world of the IOR racing yacht which, in various designs, I sailed from day two of my sailing career right up until stepping off the deck of a Maxi yacht many years later. Even indirect exposure to boats like Taratari and Egret were a kind of emancipation from the IOR cruiser-racer mental straitjacket that I had accidentally acquired along the way. My ‘release from treatment’ came in the form of two very different boats – the first being an 80+ year old east coast Gaffer , built of wood of course and having no modern gear and then the small and light Hunter Liberty.

Mentally, my time studying and trying to understand Taratari, the Sampan (Gold of Bengal) , Egret and so forth was also a lesson in simplicity and low tech construction. Where that took me in practice was building an even smaller plywood boat in my backyard , continually looking for low tech solutions to practical problems – low tech northern rigs like Lugs’l for example . The whole other side which I take from both Corentin and Capucine is that of actually working with my head and my hands……and mostly with simple tools and materials.

Home made, hand carved spoon in local Cherry and home made cleats made in English Ash.