At 17 years old, growing up in a small farming village in Québec where winter temperatures could reach minus 30 degrees, I had no idea that tall ships even existed.

Then I found myself aboard the beautiful Our Svanen, sailing for six weeks from Acapulco, through the Panama Canal, to Puerto Rico.

I returned home to Québec and spent the following Canadian summer sailing the Great Lakes aboard the brigantines Pathfinder and Playfair. There we carried out sailing manoeuvres at a level that, more than forty years later, I have rarely seen equalled.

At the end of that season, I was called back to Our Svanen, this time as an officer, and flown to Denmark to join her. I then spent the next two and a half years aboard, from 1983 through 1984 and half of 1985, sailing from Denmark to the Canary Islands, across the Atlantic to Bermuda and Canada, and repeatedly up and down the East Coast between Canada and the Caribbean.

By then I was no longer simply discovering tall ships. I was living aboard them and learning from them.

When I eventually left Our Svanen, I decided to continue travelling around the world. Along the way there were other ships and experiences, including Shanti of Saba in the Caribbean and the maxi Condor. It was aboard Condor, during my first crossing of the equator in the Pacific, that I first encountered Bounty and Penny in Tahiti.

Eventually my travels brought me to Australia and, in November 1986, to Pier One in Sydney, where I walked aboard Bounty.

I impressed the Captain enough with the knowledge I had gained of ships to get a position for the voyage, even though the ship already had a full crew.

Paul Lepington's crew had come from New Zealand and we replaced the mizzen lower shrouds. We used an old car to spin the wire while serving it rather than turning the serving mallet around the wire. It became a technique I continued to use, eventually serving more than a kilometre of wire, including Bounty's fore shrouds, all of “Le Pélican's” No. 1 shrouds and the lower shrouds on both masts of Solway Lass.

We sailed Bounty through Bass Strait with 60 knots on the nose, housing the jibboom to protect it from the tremendous beating as two 500 hp eight-cylinder Perkins engines pushed us against the weather.

We crossed the Great Australian Bight and sailed into Fremantle on the day Australia lost the America's Cup.

From there we sailed across the Indian Ocean to the Maldives, then Djibouti, up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean. We stopped in Malta before sailing through Gibraltar and north across the Bay of Biscay.

It was there that I closed the loop from my earlier voyage aboard Our Svanen and completed my first circumnavigation of the globe — on my 23rd birthday, aboard Bounty, with the woman who would later become my wife.

From a small farming village in Québec at minus 30 degrees, where at seventeen I hadn't even known tall ships existed, to sailing around the world aboard Bounty six years later.

We continued to Portsmouth to join the First Fleet re-enactment, then sailed south again to the Canary Islands, Cape Verde and Brazil. I eventually left Bounty in Brazil with Toni, the cook and photographer, to cross South America by foot. Toni was the photographer responsible for the Photo World magazine images.

One of my fondest memories of Bounty is remarkably simple: Emptying the sail locker and setting every sail we had.

That opportunity is one of the reasons I believe Bounty is so important. She is a beautiful size and carries an extraordinary, fully traditional rig, including a spritsail. Sailing her gave us rare opportunities to actually use that rig as it was intended — setting studding sails and spritsails, striking the topgallant yard and mast at sea, and carrying out manoeuvres that are becoming increasingly rare to experience firsthand.

The knowledge I brought aboard Bounty had already been gathered across oceans and aboard very different sailing vessels. What I learned aboard Bounty then became part of everything that followed.

Eventually I returned to Canada, where I became Chief Rigger and carried out the authenticity research and construction of the rig for Le Pélican D’Iberville, a replica of the 17th-century French warship associated with Pierre Le Moyne D’Iberville.

In 1994, that work was independently reviewed by the renowned traditional shipbuilder Melbourne Smith. In his report he wrote:

“I would like to reiterate the exceedingly high calibre of the rigging and the marlinspike seamanship in its manufacture and deployment. I believe that it is without equal when compared to other historic or replica vessels on display or in service in North America.”

He went further, strongly recommending:

“the full-time employment of a master ship rigger of equal talent and experience as the original rigger as soon as possible.”

For me, Le Pélican wasn't the beginning of that knowledge. It was an expression of everything that had come before — the ships, the oceans, the sailors and riggers, and the accumulated experience of actually sailing and handling traditional rigs.

I eventually returned to Australia and remarkably found myself working once again on Our Svanen. Many years later I would even replace her foremast — working on the same ship that, when I was seventeen years old, had first opened the door to a world I hadn't known existed.

Each of the steps I have described here has a much bigger story behind it, with many more ships, people, photographs and memories still to come.

Looking back over more than forty years, what strikes me is how interconnected those stories are.

And somehow, so many of the threads lead back to two ships:

Our Svanen and Bounty.

Mario

Contributor: Mario Ruel

Record type: Personal recollection

This account was contributed by Mario Ruel and is reproduced as part of the 1978 Bounty Living Library. His story reflects his own experiences, memories and perspective.