Footballs

Hi Mark,

Those are the anchor bouys, they must provide some sort of asisstance?

Michael D.

Hi;

 Those are indeed Anchor Bouys .This was the way to keep them up out of the way .The " Bedwalks " on each side were for the crew to bring up their hammocks for airing and day stowage .They also served as slight protection from small arms fire from the main deck of an opponent close hauled and meaning to board .

Thanks guys! Been meaning to ask that question for some time now and kept forgetting . I just saw them again the other day and it reminded me. Neat stories!

Anchor bouys are one of those nifty things that are nodded over and not nearly asked enough about. 

One some of the fancier capital ships, in peacetime, the bouys were sometimes painted half red, and half green, to match the starboard and port designation colors.

You put buoys on the anchors, as anchors are expensive things, as are the cable hawsers bent to them.  If an emergency beckoned, you slipped the cable (one does not casually chop though a 36' cable except in dire extremis).  Since the rode was put out at 1:7, the buoy line was relatiely short, and gave a good indication of where the crown was, under the waters.

Once the extremity was passed, you could sail over to the buoy and clap on tackle to it, and hoist away.  Because the buoy line was bent on the crown of the anchor, hoisting that line would pluck the "sunk" fluke out of the bottom neatly.

On a rocky bottom, sometime the buoy line would be used to wrest the anchor loose of the rocks, rathet than just using brute force heaving away at the rode.

Our dafi detailied up a very nice buoy for his recent partial side of Victory.  Durst if I can find the thread to link it, though

Allows the coast police of the foreign port to find your lost hook and mark it as a hazard to navigation.

or charge to pull it up.

Capn aludes to the art of mooring which is something most watercraft spend most of their time doing.

The skipper on the boat I sail earns his wage as a diver securing mooring bouyies.

And now! You know the rest of the story! Thanks guys! This "mystery" has been bothering me for a while and I'm sure I'll have plenty more as my ship modeling goes on.

A lot of factors at work.

Was reading (elsewhere) on how there's a significant shift in the perception of value for things.  We, in our modern age, presume factory goods to be emminently replacable, and relatively cheaply.

Back in the 1800, this was much less the case.  Even with cheap labor (a shilling a day was pretty high end), product cost was deeply related to the time needed to produce them.  So, rope-making was not cheap.  It took a great deal of labor to make up yarns, then threads, then strands, just to stare making up ropes, hawsers, and then cables.  An anchor cable might take a month to make up.  Not something you'd casually cutand throw away.

But, anchored in 10 fathoms against a lee shore with a gale blowing in, the time it would take to bring in 70 gathoms of line (which is only advancing at the rate of π(capstan diameter)/2 per revolution), it would be much easier to let the rode run out the hawse to be collected later. 


Now, in my time ('85-'16) there was rather a lot of debate as to whether USN ship ought be anchored at all.  The larger ships are better served at moorings or pierside; smaller ships have issues in not havign the anchor hit the sonar dome (astute observers will have noted how many USN vessels ship an anchor through the bullnose, and another at the extreme aft end of the forecastle--both of those are to clear the submerged dome below).  In Amphibs, we would use buoys more often, as the anchors wer more often fouled or gone rank