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Tectona Sailing Away Days 2010

A select group of sailors from the College Sailing Club ably led by Mr Mills, Mrs Ballance and myself braved azure skies, a turquoise sea, temperatures in the 20°C and mellow Southerly or Southwesterly breezes aboard Tectona for Away Days 2010! Tectona is a 70 tonne, 80 foot ketch built in the 1920s entirely from teak. She is quite simply a joy to sail!

The spacious deck, well appointed quarters, civilised wheel house and chart room, made the great experience of helming this vessel decidedly grand! The students: Lauren Tang, Simon Green, Mike Terry, Patrick Howell and James Nichol took every aspect of passage planning, chart work, navigation, night watch and of course sailing this remarkable training ketch in their stride. Tectona flies no less than 6 separate sails; pulling or ‘sweating’ the ropes that raise the ‘throat’ and the ‘peak’ of the mainsail takes skill and sheer brute force! Raising 40 meters of anchor chain and a massive anchor raised one’s blood pressure considerably! Luckily we had Skipper Dom playing reels on his fiddle to help us relax from the strain, coupled with the sheer exhilaration of diving off the bowsprit into deep, rather fresh, Cornish water!

The net below the bowsprit became the place to chill and sleep off the previous night’s anchor watch.

Good food was aplenty. Mike Terry’s now legendary pancakes appeared twice on the breakfast menu and battered cod and chips on Saturday afternoon helped console us after 90 minutes in the Chain Locker on Falmouth quay, watching Germany thrash England and eliminate us from the World Cup.

A highlight for me was mooring until nightfall at Cawsand where the Skipper handed over to the students to navigate and drive the boat back into the Mayflower Marina using charts and navigational lights.

Tectona is a wonderful boat and Clifton College should certainly explore further use of her in the future.

Owen Lewis
Master i/c Sailing

24 August 2010

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