Word: topmasts
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Several things went wrong as the Gertrude L. Thebaud of Gloucester, Mass. and the Bluenose of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia got ready for the international fishermen's races last week. On the way to Gloucester the fore topmast of Bluenose buckled. The Gertrude L. Thebaud sprang a leak in her stern during a practice spin. She was hauled out and re-calked. Such a leak meant nothing at all, insisted Captain Ben Pine. Boats built for work instead of pretty racing must show marks of their trade once in a while. Gertrude L. Thebaud was designed by Frank Paine...
...loss, wedged on the reef with a 100° list, wrecked pilothouse gone, light bulkheads crushed, spar deck swept clean, gun-deck partially under water and littered with wreckage, engine rooms obstructed with wreckage and filled two feet deep with sand and coral, the starboard side crushed, one funnel, topmast and all top hamper down or overboard...
...Then, it will be remembered, conditions had to be exactly right; the sea could not be too choppy, yet there had to be enough wind to make it a race. If the weather kicked up rough at all, one or the other of the boats would carry away a topmast and have to refit...
...route would require a tunnel to be drilled through solid rock, high enough to allow there lower masts of a ship to pass under. This trunnel would have been very expensive, and it was also found that the expense that would have to be increased in sending down the topmast of vessels would offset the advantage gained by the canal, so the scheme was a bandoned. The plan of a ship railway was declared by engineers impracticable for mechanical reasons and by seamen, on account of the strain imposed on a vessels hull by lifting it out of water...