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Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 477, 4 June 1890, Page 3

The use of oil by vessels when lying-to in a gale is becoming universal. Various devices have been patented in America and in Germany for using oil to windward. Two German plans consist in having a gun which will throw an explosive shell charged with oil some distance in the wind’s eye, but such systems, though they look well on paper, are obviously impracticable in nearly all merchant ships. Another, patented in London, and which appears to be simple and effective, is to have oil-tubes attaced co a sea-anchor or drogue. The apparatus, in principle, is a square-cub sail, floated by a yard, fitted with four guys, one at each corner, and this is veered ahead of the ship, after being made securely fast to the bows by about 60 fathoms of hawser. In this way it keeps the vessel’s head to the sea, and the two oil-tubes, carrying from two to three gallons each, give off their oil in sufficiently small quantities to keep down the sea, and to last right through the length of an ordinary gale without further attention than fully charging them before putting overboard. This apparatus is eligible also for ship’s lifeboats, yachts, torpedo-boats, and other small craft. The inventor claims that when voered ahead of a boat, attached to 20 or 25 fathoms of painter, it works so effectually as to take the crest off tho seas before they can reach her, and leaves nothing more dangerous for the boat to contend against than a high unruffled swell, which any boat will ride over if managed with a fair amount of care.