About the Crew

We will post regular articles and updates here about the people who sail the Matthew. The crew is a mixture of paid professional sailors and volunteers who help look after the ship in harbour and when visiting summer maritime festivals.

Skipper Rob Salvidge is a qualified Offshore Yachtmaster with around 30,000 miles of ocean sailing under his belt. His father taught him to sail in a variety of boats both in the Bristol Channel and Cornwall where he also learnt a lot from fishermen in the tiny cove of Cadgwith near the Lizard.

He and his wife Jane own the Bristol Ferry Boat Company which operates 8 passenger boats in Bristol so on a day off from Matthew you’re just as likely to see him at the helm of one of the famous Yellow and Blue vessels which bustle around the harbour where Matthew is moored.

Before becoming Master of the Matthew most of his deep sea sailing was in modern fast racing yachts. Here he explains how he switched from plastic to wood – from fast to slow!

By Rob Salvidge master Matthew

“I sat in the baking Portuguese sunshine. Sipped a cool beer, gazed across an azure sea, Africa somewhere over the horizon.

I’d sailed - raced, down here on a 68 foot yacht. Biscay was messy, didn’t see France or Spain, when the nice warm Algarve air kicked in, it started to feel right; I started to remember why sailing is good.

The waitress brought us another beer. We talked about - Why is sailing good? When does it feel right? My discussion partner was Kiwi yacht racing superstar Grant Dalton. An offshore rock god, a Bono of boating.

He said “what makes sailing fun is doing it very fast”. He was preparing a giant cat for a quick purr round the globe. I said I liked fast but also enjoyed traditional, wood and creaking spars. Heavier sails, not rigging so tight it feels like it will snap.
The sun sank slowly in the deepening, navy, autumnal, sky.
He looked at me with pity.

Salvation drifted slowly into view. A three masted barque. Topgallants, stuns’ls, all canvas up, beautiful. We chatted some half hour or more. The ship moved right to left slower than a fisherman in a dory could row. “Wow” I said “that’s what I mean, no plastic, just the wind in the canvas, the smell of the tar, the singing of the shanties …..”

“Yeah but too frigging slow” he drawled “anyway see you guys in the casino later”

Immaculate in sailor stripe polo vest and fawn shorts, he bounded up the steps of the hotel terrace. At home in this glittering modern marina, gleaming white carbon fibre racing machine on the dock,  constant 25 knot breeze by day,  fish restaurants, cocktail bar, gaming tables by night. Very alluring, a very faraway life for a Bristol boy like me, but brought close by a chance encounter with a confident sailing supremo who bothered to share his thoughts with a racing novice from the other side of his world.

That night the casino, the glitz, the glamour of the yacht racing world crowded out all my romantic thoughts of big square riggers ploughing the seas.  I thought “OK maybe fast is the thing”.

Back in Bristol it was dark and wet and cold, the only traditional ship in the harbour wasn’t going anywhere till the spring, I was keen to sail more now.

Don't get me wrong, life ashore was good. I'd never been forced to do an unpleasant days work in my life, the BBC had been good to me, a fair voice and an idea of what makes a good story had combined to create a charmed existence where business and pleasure mixed seamlessly.

But my lady was on her big life adventure, somewhere down near Panama by now and bound across the Pacific to Hawaii by way of Galapagos. Somehow, imbibed with a new sense of freedom from the stormy trip down to Portugal, I wasn't relishing a Bristol winter on my own and was ripe for being charmed by the next available fix.

It came with the offer from maverick seadog Tony Bullimore to join his team for a spin around the world. He was fixing up a lean speed machine just like Grants. A catamaran as wide as it was long, a mast looking too tall, raked like it might fall, living space too small, nowhere to store your books, hardly anywhere to eat -  but fast.  

Long story, short story, sailed to New Zealand, too much in a hurry to stop anywhere on the way much, apart from Gibraltar, odd place. Few people have sailed so far, so fast, 35 knots at a stretch when wind and yacht and sea all heading in roughly the same direction.
Saw lots of Albatross and seas as big as the rolling Mendip Hills back home. Never saw an iceberg, but they were there. You’d rather see them than not, hit one at night at that speed and welcome to a recreation of the scene after Titanic sunk.

Even for a traditionalist at heart it was a life changing experience. A great way to grasp the contrast between the era of the mighty clippers and sailing trading ships and today’s fast efficient seafaring world. Now Deep South ocean passages are only for madmen who can’t find enough thrills on dry land.

So Job done, I could now call myself a sailor. I’d been across an ocean or two pretty quick, run the galley, run the communications gear, fixed a few things, made the boat sail fast. I’d be able to tell Grant Dalton a thing or to next time I ran into him!

After a bit more racing and modern yacht cruising, the amazing opportunity came to command that, wooden, creaky, sometimes leaky and frigging slow traditional ship.

Matthew is not quite like the brigs and the barques, the schooners and the ketches, the cutters and the yawls, the prawners, the crabbers and the herring picarooners. Matthew is the pirate ship, the explorer’s ship, like Narnias Dawns Treader taken to the dark place at the bottom of the world by Prince Caspian.
In its day Matthew was as awesome and as breathtaking for speed as the maxi cats of today. The explorers who headed the great 15th century voyages into the unknown, Cabot, Columbus, Vespucci, De Gama were like a cross between Isambard Brunel, Neil Armstrong and Grant Dalton.

They travelled far and fast by methods few understood, to end up somewhere no one else had ever really been.

They charted the world we now know, they brought back exotic souvenirs, they shrunk the world. They made the impossible and the unfathomable, possible and comprehensible.
Matthew, our modern recreation, does just that too. It connects with that time long ago when to most people a white knuckle ride and a great adventure was a donkey ride to the next village. So to be the master and commander of this lovely little ship is to fuse Cabot’s world with Grant Dalton’s world. They’re not very far apart at all really, just 500 years.”