Ten days under the Q flag | From the workshop #12

In the last newsletter I mentioned July as our best month ever. August just blew through that record. Thank you so much - I don’t know if we are developing a new monthly turnover floor, or if these are just blips in the matrix, but regardless, it means a lot.

Thirty-seven days at sea, from San Francisco to the Marquesas aboard my 32ft boat Harmony, the boom snapped clear in half weeks earlier, with only enough diesel aboard to motor into port when we finally arrived. Then 10 days at anchor avoiding French Polynesian customs and the police.

I have thought about that arrival more than usual lately, because I have spent the last few weeks making flags.

A flag on a boat is not decoration. It is information, and mostly it is information about you. The yellow one, the Q flag, means you have arrived from somewhere else and have not been cleared: nobody comes aboard, nobody goes ashore, you sit where you are until an official decides otherwise. The courtesy flag, the host nation's flag flown from the starboard spreader, is the other half of the sentence. It says whose water you are in and that you know it.

Which is to say that a flag is a declaration. And in the Marquesas, we left our Q flag flying for 10 days.

I have never entirely worked out how I feel about that stretch. What I remember more clearly is the practical arithmetic of it. The boom was broken. We repaired it with a piece of Kauri, hand tools, and bamboo a local cut out of the jungle for us in exchange for rum, which is the sort of transaction that only makes sense a very long way from a hardware store. The Q flag continued to fly because the cost to enter French Polynesia was high, and all we wanted to do was fix our boom. There are rules at sea, perhaps unwritten, but well understood among mariners. A vessel may seek refuge for repair or water. We claimed repair (true), left the Q flag flying and remained in a legal liminal state. 

On a small boat, in the era before everyone had a satellite phone in their pocket, cloth was how you spoke to strangers. Signal flags could tell another vessel that you were disabled, or manoeuvring with difficulty, or that you needed a pilot, and they worked at distance, in wind, without power, in weather that would drown a radio. A flag did no physical work at all. It carried no load, kept nothing dry, held nothing together. And it was among the most useful things on the boat.

In the last newsletter I wrote that the first Workshop Edition had no practical argument behind it and that I had looked for one. That was true of the object on my bench, and I let it stand because I liked the honesty of it. However, flags were never useless. They were just useful in a way that has almost nothing to do with wearing well or keeping the rain off.

So, let’s go: Workshop Edition 001. Two designs, Range and Horizon, which are the only two directions this island really offers. Photographed at the inimitable Captains Rest, my close friend and fellow captain Sarah Andrews' shack at Lettes Bay, located on the very edge of Macquarie Harbour.

Range is the inward one. A few years ago my brother and I took a sub-four-metre RIB with a two stroke outboard and screamed across Macquarie Harbour, going as far up the Gordon River as we could get, camping along the way in the rain. There is a Huon pine up there arching over the water that we stood beneath and could not date. They grow about a millimetre a year, so it was probably as old as the Pyramids. People used to fell them with axes and float them down the river because the oil in the timber means they will not rot, which tells you something about what the place was for, and how recently.

Horizon is the other direction. From the south of Tasmania there is nothing between here and the ice.

Both are cut from the last of the Australian made oilskin, navy and field tan, appliquéd rather than printed, which means every line of colour on them is a separate piece of cloth that had to be cut and sewn to the one beside it. The hoist band is reinforced and carries solid brass eyelets, pressed in outer Melbourne on machinery over a century old that was converted from steam to electricity and never retired. Twenty five of each design, numbered, each with a provenance card recording where the cloth came from.

There is a tradition behind the way they are made, which I have written about on the product page rather than here, because it involves the Royal Navy and a room called the Colour Loft. The short version is that flags were never a factory product. They were cut and sewn in the sail loft, by the people who made the sails, out of the same cloth.

I am aware that a wall flag will not clear you into anywhere. Nobody is going to see one hanging above a bench in Hobart or a fireplace in Tromsø and conclude anything about your quarantine status. It is a flag with all the function taken out and only the declaring left in, which is either the whole point or an admission, depending on the day I suppose.

Twenty five of each, and then that is it. When the cloth is gone the cloth is gone, which is the case for everything we make from this roll now, and increasingly the reason I make anything.