Twice a month for several years, until 1996, a Dutch sailing barge, the Albatros, nosed her way along the tortuous channel into the harbour at Wells-next-the-Sea in North Norfolk. Each time, she carried soya bean meal from Ghent in Belgium for Dalgety.

She was continuing - indeed reviving - a long connection between Wells and small sail traders for this now tiny port was one of several in Norfolk which once thrived on East Anglia's medieval wool trade and Icelandic fishing exploits and had for centuries handled grain exports and in-bound coal from Newcastle.

By the late 20th century, most of that was long gone and so Albatros was regarded with affection in Wells, a link with the old days, something to show the children. Several times, I had seen her tied up at the quay among the whelkers but one evening in September 1996, I happened to stumble upon her farewell party.

The contract had finished and she was about to depart for the last time. Two hundred or so people stood on the quay, being serenaded from the deck by the Sheringham Shantymen who were singing, well, shanties really.

Hanging on for twenty minutes, I took in the whimsicality and nostalgia, banged off a few shots and then went off on the original business which had taken me there. Three years later, I came across a cutting of that event from the local paper and immediately wondered what became of Albatros.

A phone call to the Wells harbour master yielded a mailing address in Edam, Holland to which I then wrote asking where she was working these days and, if she was visiting any UK ports, could I catch up and have a chat?

Two months on, a reply came from the skipper to say that she was working out of various Dutch ports for Greenpeace, her hold converted to a classroom to teach children about the sea. Would I like to come over and have a look? Well, now that he mentioned it ...

So it was that in early April, 2000, I found myself climbing aboard from a rain-lashed wooden jetty in the Dutch port of Hoorn. I had hoped for better weather - I had even delayed my sail for a day - but still the squalls came in across the Ijsselmeer and I had to make the best of it.

As the day's cargo of schoolkids began to get to grips with what the Greenpeace volunteers were teaching them, owner/skipper Ton Brouwer told me about his ship.

She was built in Rotterdam in 1899, a 'North Sea klipper', two years after the opening of the 120 km Kiel Canal which connected the Baltic to the North Sea and cut out several hundred miles of sailing around the north of Denmark. Like many similar craft, she was built to work that route.

The first captain, a Dutchman, worked the Baltic trade until 1918 when he sold Albatros to a Danish captain who had her until 1941. He fitted her first engine in 1933 and reduced her rigging to steadying sails.

Another Dane, Captain Rasmussen, then bought her and sailed her nearly all his working life until 1978. All three skippers typically carried Scandinavian timber, building materials, grain or cattle feed, up to 180 tonnes at a time to and from the Baltic. But after Rasmussen retired, the ship spent two years sitting in Copenhagen waiting for a new owner.

It was there that Ton found her. He took her to the Dutch port of Urk where he spent four and a half years stripping her down to the bare hull and engine and then rebuilding and restoring her, the shipyard doing the bigger jobs and he doing the detailed work. It meant a new wheel house, decking, masts and rigging including a bowsprit. He also reconfigured the hatches to make them conform to modern standards.

The original hull was of riveted steel - Albatros was one of the first steel barges which succeeded the iron hulls - but the whole bottom of the ship was renewed in 1964 and everything below the waterline is now welded steel. A bigger engine had been fitted the same year.

I put in more accommodation which reduced the cargo capacity to 125 tonnes' he says. 'I also had to put in more fixed ballast because of modern stability regulations - I often had to sail empty - making the total displacement then 285 tonnes including the 125 tonnes of cargo. With the refurbishment complete in 1986, he started looking for work.

"It was hard for six months" he says, "But during 1987, we found our first cargoes and sailed our first trip, from Ghent to Macduff in Scotland. We carried soya bean meal for GK Commodities - they chartered us for that one trip but then gave us other work."

Data:
Flag:	Dutch
Port of registry:	Amsterdam
Year of construction:	1899
Length:	33.2m
Beam:	6.2m
Draft:	2.3m max
Sail area:	360 sq m
Classification:	Germ. Lloyd 100 A 4 K
Main engine:	Hundested 2 cylinder 160HP

In that first year, Albatros, sailing with three or four crew, did many runs to the south coast of England. Ton particularly liked Exmouth in the late 1980s when it was still handling cargo.

He thinks that his last trip at Christmas 1990 made him one of the last cargo boats to use the port. But south coast trips could take a long time, beating down the Channel against the south westerlies. 'So after a year, my brokers looked for more east coast possibilities. And in 1990, we found Wells and I got this regular contract with Dalgety. And it was very nice. They gave me a year contract at a time. Two cargoes a month sailing from Ghent and Rotterdam which gave me a good base of regular sailing; we did whatever else we could in between.

We sailed 10 months of the year, excluding January and February and we did around 15000 miles a year. We went to Wells 101 times and running up and down the North Sea in a stiff wind, we could make 10-12 knots which was better than many coasters. 'When the ship was built, she had lee-boards but on the North Sea, it is very difficult using lee boards. But of course, her draft is deeper than an inshore barge and so that is an advantage. And so was the Wells channel a problem?
No. We could get in on all but the narrowest neaps. Once or twice we got stuck for a couple of days in the middle of the channel but the ship is of the barge family - flat bottomed and no keel - and it was just a question of waiting for enough water. We always got in eventually with the help of the pilot and it was always an adventure. We used a pilot there because the channel changed every time. In other places, I always did it myself.

The bottom was sand blasted and repainted in the late 1970s and is very well preserved. Every year I haul her out and she always looks brand new - no rust, no fouling. And during the years of cargo sailing, I was often on the bottom in all kinds of port and it hasn't affected the paint. But trading conditions were changing all the time.

"When I began, there were still quite a few small ships working, Even at Wells, small coasters were still coming in. But after a couple of years, it tailed off." It basically came down to economies of scale, he says.
"Tonnage prices halved over the period I was trading. They kept on falling and still are. Higher tonnage is the only way to be now." Even so, for a while, the growing dearth of small coasters worked to his advantage.
"Soon, I was the only one offering small cargo space. Over three years, I made between 35 and 45 cargoes in each ten months. When many coasters were out of work, Albatros still had plenty. But prices still fell and more goods travelled by road and container. What finally finished the cargoes to Wells was BSE - mad cow disease."

"There was no demand for cattle feed and and so warehouses in England filled up and prices went down. It was no longer viable for Dalgety to get feed from the Continent when they could buy it cheaply in England. So they didn't need me. After a year, UK prices went up again but stayed the same on the Continent which meant that I might have been able to resume carrying soya. But by then I had converted Albatros to sail for Greenpeace.'

But then at the end of the 2000 season, the Greenpeace contract finished and Ton was force to look to his options in a market where the tide had turned very much against sail cargoes. Prices were even lower while insurance by then was about six times as high for cargo sailing as it was for taking passengers.

"There are greater risks because the ship is well down in the water and you don't have much margin for error" says Ton. "If something happens to the cargo hold, the ship sinks. But fitted out for passengers as we are now, we have six watertight compartments and she will sail with one of those completely flooded. When she was a trader, there were only four compartments - forepeak, aftpeak, machine room and cargo hold. To convert it back to full cargo, I would throw away £120,000 in conversion work."

So by the time I went to Holland, he had already decided to returned to Wells to see if he could work the corporate PR and hospitality markets and the sail training sector. "Perhaps the UK would be the place for that" he had said. "Perhaps even working from Wells, that would be nice. But wherever it was, if it made sense, I would do it because it is just lovely to sail a fully loaded vessel."

And that is what he did. He returned to make Wells his base in 2001 and ran a variety of trips from day sails to longer voyages to the south coast and Channel Islands. There were other days when Albatros sat in Wells harbour as a party and entertainments venue with events ranging from a wedding reception to carol singing on the quay this past Christmas. For 2002, there will be more emphasis on sail training. Ton now has a tie-up with the Ocean Youth Trust (www.oyteast.org.uk) and from Easter through the season, he and his crew will be taking youngsters on sail training trips of up to a week duration, travelling to various UK and Continental ports as far away as Kiel in Germany.

But there will still be room in the schedule for day charters or longer trips because he wants as many different people as possible to sample what he loves doing most of all, sailing a sail trader even if the cargo these days is people. As important perhaps is the fact that the last sail trader is still working and paying its way.

Links:
Ton Brouwer, 07979 087228

Albatros website - bookings: Sowerbys, Wells, 01328 711711

Ocean Youth Trust

Reproduced by kind permission of John Worrall © 2002