Volume Eight - Pre-Victorian to the present day - more aspects - Passat & Pamir at Penarth Dock - A Photo Album - 1948 - 1951

The order sent a little shiver through me that didn't have anything to do with the frigid winter wind blowing out of Antarctica, only a few hundred miles to our south. The fore royal was the very uppermost sail on the foreward mast - some seventeen stories above the deck. As the only American in the crew, I'd worked the fore royal many times on the voyage already, and although by now I'd become used to being aloft, I never really liked it. Soon the three of us were high above the deck in the darkness and screaming wind wrestling with the heavy, stiff, flapping canvas and gathering it in folds, then fastening it to the yardarm with short ropes. The job finally completed, our fingers cracked and bleeding from weeks of rough, barehanded work in the cold, we started down from the rigging. As Keith McCoy and Bill McKeikan slowly disappeared below me into the night, I saw a line that still needed securing. I stayed and fastened it as it should be. Then started down after the other two.

A light rain was blowing on the gale. With the plummeting temperature, it had formed an ice glazing on the ship's rigging since we'd been aloft. As I began to descend the long series of rope ladders known as shrouds that led down to the deck, I could feel the ice under my hands on the rope crosspieces known as ratlines'.

A fine description of life aboard 'Pamir'. I contacted the Ålands sjöfartsmuseum on the island of Åland in Finland, the home of the sailing vessel 'Pommern', a sister ship to 'Pamir' and 'Passat', asking them to search their archive for information relating to Penarth. The following documents were kindly provided by a lovely lady named Anna and relate to the 'Pamir' during her time at Penarth. The first detail to amend in my articles on the subject was that 'Pamir' extended her visit to Penarth until she finally sailed on 13th March 1951, almost one year later than was originally thought. The following documentation confirms this fact.