GLEANER

The Sea Salts and Sail festival in the Cornish village of Mousehole was, by all accounts, one of the best British sailing events of 2018. Roughly 50 boats were packed in the picturesque little fishing harbor at the southwestern tip of the U.K., less than 10 miles from Land’s End. There were sculling races, music, poetry, model boat races, flag-making, and cooking demonstrations. There was even a boatbuilding event, with a group of people planing down a 35' pole on a boat moored up at the quayside.

The work taking place aboard that boat wasn’t a demonstration. The pole was to be the bowsprit of the 1878 Lowestoft drifter GLEANER, newly restored by the Penryn, Cornwall, shipwright Spike Davies. Spike had four-sided the pole before leaving Falmouth two days earlier, then led a crew in eight-siding it while GLEANER was anchored off Mousehole, and continued finishing it off in the harbor so that GLEANER could join the races.

Thus, on the first day of racing, while the rest of the fleet sailed around the sparkling waters of Mounts Bay in what would prove to be England’s hottest summer on record, Spike and friends were busy rounding off the last corners of GLEANER’s new bowsprit. They joined the fleet on the second day, setting her giant 1,500-sq-ft fore lug, which Spike and his girlfriend, Elle Demaus, had stitched together out of donated sails only one week earlier. The opening for the new bowsprit wasn’t quite right, so, as GLEANER drifted around the course in the gentlest of breezes, Spike and friends chainsawed a more suitable aperture through the boat’s bulwarks. They eventually gave up racing and retired for lunch, but they were able to set off that afternoon with bowsprit in place and with GLEANER fully rigged for the first time since she was brought ashore more than 40 years earlier.