A Ravel of Waters

Now that the wraps were off his mystery guest, Don became vocal. 'Mr Thomsen was visiting Cape Town. He was dead keen to meet you. A mutual yachting friend put us in touch.'

Thomsen brushed aside Don's courtesies. Sail was what mattered in his scheme of things, not social niceties. The latent power I had noticed about the man was more in evidence now.

He said, almost declaiming the facts, 'Jetwind is a seventeen thousand tonnes, six-masted sailing ship of the most revolutionary design that has ever appeared on the high seas. She bears no resemblance to the old-time clipper or windjammer. The only thing she has in common with them is being powered by sail. Even her sails are not sails in the accepted sense. They are aerodynamically perfect aerofoils. There is no rigging, no old-time spider's web of ropes. The masts are special alloy, unstayed and stream-lined, actuated by hydraulic servo-mechanisms or locked in trim by a push-button on her bridge. A single operator only is needed. There is roller-type automatic sail furling and reefing. It works by means of stainless steel runners along the yards. Every operation aboard Jetwind is automated. Computers determine her optimum sailing angle and yard trim. The design has been evolved over years and tested by the Institut fur Schiffbau in Hamburg. Thousands of wind-tunnel tests went into the final design.' 'They call her the nuclear-age marvel’ interjected Don.

'She is that’ Thomsen agreed. 'Everything – and more. On passage she is weather routed to utilize the most favourable winds on her ongoing course. Data is fed by satellite twice a day into her computers. Conventional navigation went overboard with all the rest of the old-fashioned junk surrounding windjammers. Push-button prints from computers do it all. At any moment of the day or night she can establish her position – to within half a mile – on any ocean. All the captain has to do is to press a button and read a dial.'

'The sea isn't licked by push-buttons and computers’ I observed. 'The same goes for Jetwind's unsupported masts and yards. Fifty-two metres high! I'll withhold judgement until I've seen how Jetwind performs in a Southern Ocean blow.'

Thomsen met my scepticism with obvious self-control. 'Jetwind is as radical in construction as in conception. We brought in aircraft manufacturers for the long, lightweight masts. Their experience in assembling wing structures and understanding the stresses involved was what we needed, not old-fashioned ship-building methods. We reduced overhead costs by using off-the-shelf aircraft mountings for the masts and yards as well’

'It sounds like science fiction to me. But seeing is believing!'

Thomsen did not raise his voice, but the power which had brought Jetwind to reality in the face of the sceptics and scoffers and put sail back on the high seas pulsed through his reply,

'I am not a dreamer, get that clear. I am a business-man, a ship-owner. Nor is Jetwind my brain child. First and foremost, my stake in Jetwind is money. The dream part belonged to a German engineer named Wilhelm Prolss. That dream began a long time ago, before World War II. Prolss was attending a dry-as-dust business conference in Hamburg. The board room overlooked the harbour. Prolss was trying to keep awake through a dull discussion. Then, under the window, a tug went by towing an old four-masted barque to the scrap yard. It was a sight to make a sailor sad, but Prolss wasn't a sailor. Yet it triggered something deep inside his brain. Ten thousand years of man's skill and endeavour to conquer the sea lay behind that pathetic old ship going to the knackers, he told himself. Was the sailing ship really so inefficient? Did man's use of the wind have to end tragically like that?'

Don refilled our glasses. The twilight over the serene sweep of waters below us was as softly melancholy as the sight of Prolss's doomed windjammer must have been.

Thomsen enmeshed us in his narrative. 'From that day, for twenty-one long years, the idea of wind-power incubated in Prolss's mind. Finally, he took his ideas to the Institut fur Schiffbau in Hamburg. The experts became sold on the idea. For ten years scientists wind-tunnel tested, examined, redesigned, perfected. They made models – radical, space-age-looking structures – of masts, yards, sails, hulls, hydraulic machinery for furling the sails and trimming the masts and yards. Finally they came up with the design that became Jetwind – a space-age sailing ship of seventeen thousand tonnes, one hundred and fifty metres long, masts fifty-two metres high, and a gigantic sail area of nine thousand, four hundred and thirty square metres. There had never been a ship like it before.'

'So you've rescued an endangered species,' I said. 'The new-age windjammer arises, phoenix-like, from the Aaland Isles.'