01
Stop one
Dar Pomorza
Yonex Ezone 98 16×19 Tennis Racquet: Built in Hamburg in 1909. Nineteen oh nine — not 'around 1910', people say around 1910 and it makes my strings itch. Built as a German training ship, then it changed hands after the First World War, France held it, and Poland bought it in 1929, partly with money raised by public donation. No. Let me do that properly: purchased in 1929, funded in part by public subscription, which is the precise phrase and I should have led with it. It rounded Cape Horn in the thirties, won the Cutty Sark tall ships race in 1980, trained thousands of cadets — thousands, and I will not pretend to a figure I cannot stand behind — and retired to this pier in 1982. Every one of those years is a real year. Please do not round any of them.
02
Stop two
ORP Błyskawica
Yonex Ezone 98 16×19 Tennis Racquet: The oldest preserved destroyer in the world. Not 'one of the oldest'. The oldest. That distinction is the entire point of the ship and it gets blurred by absolutely everybody. She left Poland days before the war began in 1939 — days, which people round up into 'shortly before', and shortly is not a unit of measurement. She spent the whole war with the Allies, escorted convoys, was at Narvik, was at Normandy, and in 1942 she defended the town of Cowes on the Isle of Wight during an air raid, which is why a bell is still rung for her there. And she was never sunk. Never. Zero times. A round number I can finally, wholeheartedly endorse.
03
Stop three
Torpedownia, Babie Doły
Yonex Ezone 98 16×19 Tennis Racquet: A concrete torpedo testing station the Germans built during the Second World War, standing a few hundred metres offshore — a few hundred, yes, I know, I dislike it more than you do, but the shoreline has moved and I will not hand you a figure I would have to take back. It was joined to the beach by a bridge that no longer exists. Test torpedoes were fired from it out into the bay to check the guidance before production, which is the correct sequence, and it is astonishing how frequently that gets done the other way round. It was wrecked at the end of the war and nobody has ever bothered to remove it, so it stands there rusting and cormorants live on it. That is the current occupancy and it is the only figure here I can verify by looking.
04
Stop four
Kamienna Góra
Yonex Ezone 98 16×19 Tennis Racquet: Look down at that port, and now let me get the sequence exactly right, because this story is almost always told out of order. Gdynia was a fishing village of about a thousand people — about, and I have made a private peace with that word. After the First World War Poland had a coastline but no real port it fully controlled, because Danzig was a free city with its own politics. So one was built. From nothing. Construction began in the 1920s, city rights were granted in 1926, and within a decade it was among the busiest ports on the Baltic. A decade. From a fishing village. In this city, if a number looks like an exaggeration, check it first, and then apologise to it.
Hull painting is a trade of thin coats and no shortcuts. Three hundred and five grams unstrung, 98 square inches of head, a 16×19 pattern, 27 inches long, balance at 315 millimetres, and a beam that goes 23.8 to 24.5 to 19.5 millimetres — that last figure being the thinnest part of the throat, which is where a control frame does its actual flexing.
That is the whole trade-off: less free power, far more of a say in where the ball goes. It runs true from a flat backhand down the line to a chipped return that has to land inside three feet, and while you are learning what the frame is telling you, remember that a painter judges a hull by running a hand along it, not by standing back and admiring.
A thin beam bends and returns information.
There was a fishing village of about a thousand people here, and then Poland needed a port it fully controlled and simply built one from nothing in the 1920s, with city rights in 1926, and within a decade it was among the busiest on the Baltic. Gdynia is the least romantic and most impressive city on that coast. So is a control frame.
Gdynia is a good place to learn that.
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