In praise of ... tall ships

From Malin to Hebrides, Fair Isle and Viking, through seas made familiar by the shipping forecast, some 60 sailing ships are racing from Liverpool to Norway. The annual tall ships race, which began in earnest yesterday, shows, magnificently, that the age of sail is not over. Around a million people are said to have come to see the ships in Liverpool this week, as the city's docks were filled, just as they were 150 years before, with sloops and barques, ketches and full-rigged square ships, a jumble of spars and masts that dominated the waterfront. The ships come from all over the world, offering excitement and training to their crews, many of them young people who have never done anything like it before. The vessels are living things, kept at sea by people who love them; so much more vibrant than other ocean-going relics now tied up as museums. The Moshulu, which carried a young Eric Newby to Australia in 1939, a journey he described in The Last Grain Race, is now a restaurant in Philadelphia; the Falls of Clyde, the last floating four-masted ship in the world, may soon be sunk at sea because money cannot be found to preserve it. More cheerful is the prospect of a new era of commercial sailing: this week the Kathleen & May, a 108-year-old triple-masted wooden ship arrives in Dublin carrying a cargo of 30,000 bottles of French wine. There are other schemes to attach giant kites to container ships, to cut their fuel consumption. The old rule of the sea, "steam gives way to sail", may soon be needed again.