A Busy Day in Falmouth

In which Sid and Doris visit a Maritime Museum and… not much else.

It turns out that Falmouth hosts the Cornish part of the National Maritime Museum, including the National Small Boat Collection.  Sid and Doris are drawn thence, not like moths to a flame but perhaps like barnacles to a hull.

This is August in Cornwall and with the weather behaving as expected there are Family Friendly Activities,  starting with a most engaging and funny aerial ballet show based on the lifeguarding and surfing scene around Falmouth.

Next door is a large exhibition on the development of the surfing scene, including a once-seen never-forgotten photo of some original surf-boarders.

Many of the members of the National Small Boat Collection are suspended from the ceiling of the main hall, including the extremely elegant Merk, a prototype for the Andrew’s slipper launch which was designed to be driven like a car and which is possibly the only (although very distant) rival we have ever seen to the amazing Intermezzo.

One gallery is devoted to the Packet routes, which carried mail and other important messages round the globe.  A most un-Byronic poem by Byron is playing, detailing the horrors of taking one of the few, cramped berths on a packet boat (do click on that link, you will enjoy it).

The tidal-underwater viewing gallery at first proves to be a sad disappointment as the glass is thickly crusted in barnacles and limpets, until it becomes clear (when small children stampede in and snatch up the magnifying glasses provided) that the whole purpose is to be able to see barnacles, limpets etc living their lives from underneath.  Whoo-hoo that is interestingly weird.

There are many other exhibits but this is a blog not a guidebook, so we will only tell you about the story of six people who survived the sinking of their yacht in a leaky liferaft and a tiny just-about-six-person-dinghy. They were picked up after 38 days.  While we were clicking on the various stories we were approached by The Man Who Didn’t Approve Of Sailing who told us that he Didn’t Approve Of Sailing because of the risks you take.  It was only after Sid and Doris had managed to wriggle clear that they realised it was an odd choice for him to visit a maritime museum.

Dinner was Mexican Cooked By White Boys and strangely reminiscent of Derbyshire Pizza (enjoyed in Derbyshire by S and D in about 1990: a pizza base lathered with shepherds’ pie). The Mexican was accompanied, for no apparent reason, by Disco Favourites Of The Seventies though there was a picture of Frida Kahlo.

There are many seagulls in Falmouth.  In fact purists will tell you there are no seagulls in Falmouth, there are herring gulls and black headed gulls and lots of other gulls, but they all make a terrible noise all night and poop everywhere and steal your chips if you dare eat chips out of doors.

Our Find of the Day is this Seagull Twizzler. The red paddles are either end of a stick which spins in almost no wind to dislodge or un-nerve the unwanted poop gull. A class invention.