The Wreck of the Yacht "Schwalbe"

on the rocky shores of rural Nova Scotia sits a mysterious rack not terribly far from the town of Lunenburg lies the washed up carcass of the once beautiful yacht befall the Schwalb isn't just another one of the thousands of private fiberglass boats that wash up along the Atlantic coast the fog is straight out of the Golden Age of ocean liners and built with the care and craftsmanship of Great Depression Germany it's not terribly hard to get to and makes a nice half-day excursion from the city of Halifax off the main road and then down a short trail and over some rocks this can be dangerous if you're clumsy and haven't spent your whole life walking but at low tide it's a straight walk across the rocks to the wreckage the Schwab which is German for the bird swallow was built in Germany in 1927 almost certainly along the North Sea coast perhaps near Bremen she's framed an oak though modern materials were worked into her during refurbishment over the past 90 or so years she's 57 feet at the waterline and 80 from the stern to the tip of the bowsprit or well at least she was but more on that later she had carved wooden moldings and Delft tiles in her kitchen spaces and all of that is gone now she was used for fishing at one point and had a schooner rig that is she was equipped with two sailing masts after changing hands and being registered to Southampton England she had her main mast removed at some point during her career she was actually cut in half in a shipyard and extended in length this is actually a common practice with cruise ships today in 2014 she was sailing around the Bahamas and encountered a terrible storm blowing her 1600 miles off course her owner brought her to Halifax to catch his breath and then moved her to nearby Lunenburg for repairs in a subsequent storm she broke free and drifted out into the bay wrecking on the rocks of Felson south at height fortunately nobody was on board and therefore nobody was hurt the waves pound the hull from the stern and have wreaked havoc on her inside I visited her for the first time back in 2017 and she's deteriorated a lot since then I took hundreds upon hundreds of photographs but unfortunately this one clip is the only one I have from that visit and she's deteriorated quite a bit since then all the other footage from this video I shot two years later in summer of 2019 she has held up though through four hard Nova Scotian winters and at least one significant hurricane back in 2017 the hull was in good shape saved for the starboard keel which had been blown out because of the way she sits on the rocks the portside interiors were still somewhat there but in those two years since the entire insight had been gutted not only that but the upper hull separated entirely from the keel the keel remains wedged in the rocks while the hull shifted about ten feet forward there's the keel block very stern of the ship right here the engines which had been under the wheelhouse are now fully exposed outside the stern there's even signs that the deck is coming detached from the hull evidencing the ship's collapse this was the bow this was the keel rounding up to the bow peak this would have reinforced it inside the hull and this beam was vertical the hull of the ship shifted forward about 5 or 10 feet crushing down lower this used to be probably 5 feet taller this collapsed forward being pulled that way at the top and remaining anchored here at the bottom and we can see that the deck itself has buckled from the strain of this actually impaled into the deck when it collapsed her mast which has long since been severed from a few feet above the deck was once fixed to her keel and ran up through the deck and is now smashed forward and severed the last bit of her canvas is still wrapped around that base [Music] stealing's still in decent shape but the deck above has begun to buckle and once that goes well then the whole ship goes I may be wrong but at this current state I estimate she has about another two years from now the end of 2019 until she has collapsed completely the sea wash is freely through the mechanics of her engine and little by little wears away at the wooden ribs of her starboard side as her lining is torn away we can really get an appreciation for the traditional style of boat building used in her construction iron nails hold her planks together and her Steel is riveted this was built at least a decade before welding became popular in shipbuilding her construction is closer to that of the old great ocean liners the wooden ribs are throwback to the sailing ships dating back for centuries it's not just any boat that wrecked on a box that happens all the time this is a pretty unique instance where a ship from the twenties should've this old ship this beautifully made wrecks on the rocks and to have it just sitting here no one can take it off there's no point in salvaging it at this point as you can tell there's no hope of repairing it but this boat was built during the Depression in Germany the country that was hit the hardest by the depression it is a beautifully built boat and it's tragic to see it sitting here and that was the wheel mounts this was the throttle ship would be moving fast now now it's stopped there's not too much left of the interior of the ship but given some remaining artifacts at the inside we can figure out the rough layout from the aft end from the wheelhouse there would be a stairwell very vertical stairwell coming down a very steep angle that long corridor would have stretched to about where I'm crouching and above me there are wooden beams that come to a point which indicate the walls of those corridors come in sort of like a triangle meet in the middle on each side of that triangle would be a doorway two sleeping quarters we can see the very last remains of sleeping quarters and approximately where the bunks would have been adjacent to the port side sleeping room is the small bathroom there's very little left the main thing you can see left is the mirror the masts would have been along the centerline immediately after the two sleeping rooms and the bathroom and behind that would have been the living quarters there would have been a sitting slash dining room as well as a kitchenette and possibly at least one more sleeping room after that above would be the wheelhouse and under the wheelhouse is the engine room there's also seems to be plenty of fuel tanks which used to line the length of the ship at least from the midsection aft [Music] you can really see the ships beautiful camber up there the camber is the fact that the ship arches camber by the way is the curvature of the ship going across her width wise the purpose of camber was to allow sea water to roll off a ship's sides and also to give the vessel additional longitudinal strength aside from debris it's not an environmental hazard the Canadian Coast Guard drained all the fuel and oil from her tanks shortly after her wrecking however locals aren't too keen on her sitting here it's an eyesore to them and it brings in a lot of partiers who trashed the place if you do try to journey out to the wrecked yacht be careful she feels as if she could slip off the rocks at any moment and be respectful to the neighbors [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Part-Time Explorer

Views: 80,921

Keywords: schwalbe, yacht, feltzen south, nova scotia, adventure, canada, explorer, trivia, southampton, ss, shwalbe, wreck, shipwreck, boat, lunenburg, history, local, lynskey, thomas, tom, inside

Id: W-SN1OcAeJM

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019