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Issue 15 Winter  2010/11.

 

 

 

 

Page 2

The Secret of Angela

 

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The Secret of Angela

Hi there
this is Peter Kirkland and I own an Eventide called Angela, you have some images on the web site. I have attached a documented life line of my small boat which I had to prepare for a wooden boat show in Sydney. I realise I haven't sent through the logs as of yet but we are composing that for a later date. I have also been carrying out a restoration program over the past few months which includes the installation of a new 15 hp inboard motor and a cockpit reconstruction. I will forward the images soon. I hope you enjoy this story as it could be true.
Regards
Peter Kirkland
 

 

WOODEN BOAT WHOPPER:

At the recent Sydney Classic & Wooden Boat Festival, boat owner Peter Kirkland was overheard trying to convince people that carbon-14 dating of splinters taken from the hull of his Eventide yacht proved that it was once an ancient Greek bireme.…

The history notice attached to his boat was as follows:

A recycled history of the wooden boat Angela

Angela is first recorded in the writings of Herodotus as the bireme Διέκπλους Ανγήλικα (“Ramming Angelica") at the Battle of Salamis in 480BC, the famous war between the Greeks and the Persians over the right to manufacture salami. She was later confiscated by the Romans and used as a floating disco during the time of Emperor Flavius Honorius, until she was captured and used as a wooden boat-shaped trailer hitched to the back of a Visigoth chariot, to carry booty overland to Scandinavia after Alaric invaded Rome in 408AD and knocked off everything that wasn’t nailed down.

Some 500 years later she is referred to in the writings of Ælfric, Abbot of Eynsham, having been reconstructed as a Viking longship "Engilla" and figuring prominently in the coastal raids of Britain at the beginning of the first millennium.

Engilla was sunk in the Thames estuary during an engagement with a drunken Irish sailor in a coracle, and remained preserved under a layer of silt until dredged out during an annual children’s eel hunt in 1730. It was at this point that she was used as a prison hulk. She was towed to Australia by Captain James Cook for a dare, and moored on the Parramatta River where as "Flying Angel" she served as a brothel and seaman’s mission until she rotted down to the waterline.

 

In 1941, when WWII required that all craft, seaworthy or otherwise, be returned to active service, she was requisitioned by the Americans and refitted as a wooden patrol torpedo boat, PT-41, which famously helped General MacArthur catch a train in Terowie.

Sadly, PT-41 was blown up by a faulty depth charge the following year, but was reconstructed from recovered debris by Maurice Griffiths as a substantially smaller cutter-rigged bilge-keeled yacht, named "Angela". Her bowsprit was mysteriously lost in a freak walking accident in the Royal National Park in 1977. However, when the missing part is restored to the pointy end, it is anticipated that she will look rather like the clipper pictured below.  Or possibly not.

 

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  Actually she looks a bit like this!
   
      'Angela'  an Eventide 26 that has been owned by Peter Kirkland on Australia for 30 years!  Send in the logs Peter!  Peter is promising to do so!
   
  Cosy interior Peter!  Peter is another new member, Welcome!
   
  Cannot be sure if this is the old one going out or new one coming in, Peter will let me know I'm sure!
   
  Angela alongside.  Very much a modern Eventide with full length cabin top and mast on top of it.
   
  The dust!  a vacuum cleaner is a must to keep it under control!

 

 

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