TC Lethbridge | The Sons of TC-Lethbridge | Tekh's Anthological Review

North About

Notes on a Passage from the Clyde to the Åland Islands

Self-published, 1935

The following year (1935) his friends and colleagues were treated to North About - Notes on a Passage from the Clyde to the Åland Islands. Once again the discourse documents a voyage undertaken during the summer months of the corresponding year. The Passat departed Greenock Pier on 3 July, but wind conditions were not favourable and the vessel had to be aided by a tug, it was an assistance that was repeatedly required over the next three days until the wind conditions became favourable for their progression. Eventually, on 6 July, the party set sail from their anchorage in Kilchattan Bay and clearing the Mull of Kintyre, they journeyed north, passing South Ronaldsay and Orkney on 10 July. By 16 July the Danish coast was in sight and they passed through the narrow channel outside Copenhagen and on into the Baltic.

On 18 July the Passat passed through a magnificent storm off the coast of Gotland and Lethbridge commented on the great banks of shining cloud over Sweden and remarked on how the Swedish coast was similar to that of Essex. At the entrance Mariehamn he was overwhelmed by the boats in the harbour and remarked that the L’Avenir - a local fore-and-aft schooner, looked, “as if she had slipped by mistake out of some print of the early nineteenth century.”
The tome contains five pages of text and five dedicated to Lethbridge’s illustrations relating to the voyage:

Plate #1: Four small illustrations of ships; Off the Laesö/Off Falsterbo/Reefed/Hull Dowd
Plate #2: Outside Stockholm
Plate #3: Åland Island Schooner and the Merkur of Marstal (Danish Schooner)
Plate #4: Purling Staysail
Plate #5: Unbending Sail

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