Cruising, The Unexpected Fun Experiences

January 26, 2021September 19, 2011 by John Harries

We were tied up alongside a fishery wharf in northern Newfoundland when the roar of powerful engines brought us tumbling up from below to see two seine boats attached stern to stern by a thick line and both at full throttle.

Now I have heard of truck pulls in the USA and our own Nova Scotia has ox pulls, but a boat pull is a new one on me. It turns out that the boat on the right has always been able to out pull the one on the left, but the erstwhile loser had just repowered with a larger engine. Ostensibly to be more efficient at its primary job of quickly encircling a school of herring by pulling the seine net out from the mother ship—but we all know the real reason for the repower, don’t we?

(Click the photographs to make them bigger.)

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John was born and brought up in Bermuda and started sailing as a child, racing locally and offshore before turning to cruising. He has sailed over 100,000 miles, most of it on his McCurdy & Rhodes 56, Morgan's Cloud, including eight ocean races to Bermuda, culminating in winning his class twice in the Newport Bermuda Race. He has skippered a series of voyages in the North Atlantic, the majority of which have been to the high latitudes. John has been helping others go voyaging by sharing his experience for twenty years, first in yachting magazines and, for the last 12 years, as co-editor/publisher of AAC.