Last Days of Sail - February 2013

Steve Peak gave us another excellent talk - this time on the history of commercial sailing ships around Britain and further afield.

Beautifully illustrated with many evocative images of the ships themselves, Steve's talk covered the earliest rigs, similar to those seen in Egyptian hieroglyphics, right up to the last days of sail in the mid-twentieth century.

Particularly interesting were the different types of fishing boat once common at Hastings, and seen in so many watercolours and prints of the town from the nineteenth century, with an explanation of why such designs were suited for our very particular conditions.