Albatross

[Keith Tindell]

Who can forget these magnificent birds gliding behind the ship for days at a time, and no matter how you try to photo them, they always look just like any seagull, because you had nothing to compare their size. I am a member of the RSB and was surprised this morning to hear that one has been seen off the East coast of UK, a long long way off track. I post the link for anyone interested, kt


https://community.rspb.org.uk/ourwor...otes_on_nature

[John Arton]

The Albatross was always considered to be a lucky sea bird if following your ship and you should never do anything to harm them.
Yet in the journal of an 17 year old girl who accompanied her father on his sailing ship on a voyage from Swansea to San Francisco in 1872, she recorded that the crew regularly caught and ate albatross.
Now that ship must have been a bad feeder.
Rgds
J.A.

[Tony Taylor]

The Albatross was always considered to be a lucky sea bird if following your ship and you should never do anything to harm them.
Yet in the journal of an 17 year old girl who accompanied her father on his sailing ship on a voyage from Swansea to San Francisco in 1872, she recorded that the crew regularly caught and ate albatross.
Now that ship must have been a bad feeder.
Rgds
J.A.

Ha ha nice one John, reminded me of something I witnessed on a Chinese crew ship. Sitting on the poop with the casab, young deck boy (looked about 12) spots a seagull (big) in the gash can over the side; he whips off his donkey jacket and sneaks up very carefully and actually catches this big herring gull. He has one almighty fight with it while we had a good laugh at him. Finally he appears to have some control over it and looks up triumphantly only for the casab to say something in Chinese to him upon which he looks crestfallen and stands up and releases the bird. Casab then turns to me and says "not good chow, very salty" I asked him had he eaten one he said "oh yes, but not good".

[Captain Kong]

The Albatross was always considered to be a lucky sea bird ..........John A.

Here was an unlucky one.................
In 1955, I was on the Monkey Island Look Out on the SUEVIC in a terrible storm sailing through the Bass Straits during the 12 to 4 Watch, at 1am.
I just saw a flash of white as an Albatross shot past the foremast light out of control in the wind, a second later it hit me, I did a double somersault, there was a bang as it hit the funnel and then it crashed onto the after deck. Dead
I was in agony, my right shoulder was dislocated and had to go to hospital when we arrived in Sydney.

The wing span of the bird was nearly 12 feet, a magnificent bird, destroyed by the wind,.
Brian