Perranporth beach in the summer is a teeming suntrap and a surfer’s paradise. Even so it’s still shockingly easy to die there, and despite the RNLI lifeguards and inshore lifeboat there are still yearly tragedies.
In the days of sail, the whole length of the N. Cornwall coast being usually a lee shore, it was ships rather than surfers that needed saving.
This song is about two such ships that were wrecked off Perranporth at the turn of the last century.
The first involved a huge steel sailing ship, La Seine, whose crew were all saved by the breeches buoy before she broke up in the surf.
The second, the Voorspode, three months later, in pretty fine weather, was less serious – no marine breathalysers in those days….
She was re-floated eventually – but lost with all hands on her next voyage.
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The Voorspode being unloaded ( so as to make it easier for her to be re-floated .... )
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La Seine - slowly disintergrating
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Her bones in the sand
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And still she's there, more than a hundred years later.
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