Brian is President of the East Coast Gaffers Association and
an authority on Arthur Ransome. He came with a fine little model of
Racundra, some good slides and a library of the works of the Great
Man. Well, if not Great at least Remarkable.
Ransome was a biographer of Oscar Wilde with the distinction
of being sued 
by
Alfred Lord Douglas (quite what for no-one liked to ask). He won the
action but fled to Russia as He won the The Manchester Guardian correspondent
to avoid the publicity and (it seems) his wife. There he fell in love
with Leon Trotsky’s ex-secretary and bought his first boat “Slug” off a beach
near Riga. Slug was 100 years old and Ransome’s only sailing experience
had been in a dinghy on the Lakes but he and Evgenia Shelepina
(His Love) made a 30 hour
storm-tossed coastal passage the day after he bought her. She wasn’t
quick. Hence the name.
“Kittiwake”, bought in Riga, was an improvement
on “Slug”. Faster, she had two bunks. They sailed her to Baltic
Port and spent the summer there. Ransome had a dinghy made by the nearest
thing locally to a boat builder: an undertaker. It was an unstable vessel.
If he moved his pipe from one side of his mouth to another, he said, he was
liable to capsize. It was then he met Otto Eggers and decided to have
him design his ideal boat, “Racundra”. Racundra was to
be a solid 30ft LOA, 12 ft beam, gaff ketch perfect for the Baltic.
Ransome planned to sail her back to England but the boat builder was so slow
that she was not available until the summer was nearly over. He just managed
to fit in one of the most famous small boat cruises ever - “Racundra’s
First Cruise” – to Helsinki (Helsingfors). He still had an English
wife so Evgenia became, for decency’s sake, “the Cook” in the book.
They were accompanied by the best sailor in the Baltic, Carl Sehmel, and he
became the “Ancient Mariner”.
