Zephy's Last Year Continued
Later on in the month we took a bungalow at West Mersea for a week and I sailed on the tide each day with any of the family that wanted to come along to explore the maze of local creeks. The plan was to take the boat back to the club on Friday evening but it rained hard when the tide flooded so I decided to leave it until Saturday. That morning we all went home by car and I planned to return to Mersea after a trade union meeting in Chelmsford with our organiser who lived near Colchester. Unfortunately the wind had blown almost gale force from the southwest during the afternoon and we found her high and dry on the beach. She had taken a terrible pounding for the keel had been forced up into the hull and the ribs pulled out from the keel. There was nothing to be done there and then so I returned home with Trevor for a meal and to get a little sleep ready for the next high water. As I lay trying to get to sleep my thoughts wandered to the yachting writer Francis B. Cooke, who in his younger days, had stepped the sound gear from one boat with a rotten hull into the sound hull of another similar craft whose gear had been swept overboard during the night by a passing barge. Had the time come to step the gear from Zephyr in another hull? Anyway the first step was to get back to her when the tide reached her at 0330 hrs. It was still blowing hard but less than gale force when we got there. My plan was to sail her off the beach and anchor her so that she would settle well out on the extensive mudflats. This would give me time to do a little work on her next day and the water would not be so rough when it reached her as well as giving me a couple of hours flood to help her round into the harbour. I left all the gear on the beach except the jib and an oar with which we steered. It was Trevor’s first sail but he gamely insisted in coming along. The anchor failed to hold and we drove ashore again so the second time we got well off the beach and then tried to sink her. Over the years I had often wondered just how much water she could hold before she sank. When the gunwale was well under we released her but she struggled up again and we had to tip her once more before she finally went down. Then we swam ashore and ran back along the beach to our clothes, home and to bed.
Next morning I was horrified when I returned to see a crowd from the local holiday camp round the boat, which they had tipped on its side to empty it by pulling down on one of the halyards. The idea apparently was to carry her ashore! I shouted to them as I approached at a run but in fact they must have sprung out the keel and popped all the ribs back in place. I plugged the gaps with clay (carried in then truly modern style in a polythene bag for I never ignore modern scientific advances). She was far tighter than I had dreamed possible (comparatively speaking) and instead of creeping along the shore, I was able to put in a couple of boards right across the mile wide river to the Bradwell shore before roaring through West Mersea like a scalded cat to the Strood where I left her on an anchor and caught the bus home. The following weekend I brought Zephyr home to Heybridge none the worst, and none the better, for her ordeal.
My search for another hull quickly alighted on the sturdy sixteen and a half foot Fairey Falcon dinghy sold as a Bermudian halfdecker, although I continued to examine all possibilities until the end of the year. Over August Bank Holiday, Jim and I sailed down to the mouth of the Crouch and back up the Colne to Wivenhoe where we camped on the saltings near the old ferry site. Off West Mersea next day I met my first Falcon dinghy under way and was very impressed. That evening, camped near the picturesquely named `Old Mersea City, we watched the sun set in a blaze of glory over Tiptree Heath. It was also setting over the reign of dear old Zephyr. Later that month she made her last trip round to Maldon quay and was then hauled up into the club yard where I took off all the useful bits including the keel and moved her over into the long grass ready for the cadet’s bonfire next summer. R.I.P!
The detailed story of the building of Shoal Waters was told in my last book `Sailing Just for fun` so I will merely summarise it here. For the rest of the year 1962 I studied other hulls on the market into which I could step the gear from Zephyr. The Silhouette was selling like mad at this time with kits at £200 and we went to see a chap who was completing one at Leigh on Sea. Another vessel available as a kit was the Firecreast. Posibilities available as plans were the Yachting Monthly Senior and the Small Craft Lysander. At this time there were at least two firms completing Fairey Falcon hulls with tiny cabins, the Bristol Venturer and the Sea Hawk. All things considered, it had to be the Falcon and the bare hull complete with transom and centreboard case and plate was ordered at the 1963 Boat Show. The cost including delivery was £137. 10 and she was delivered to the farm in the first week in February. She was completed for just another £60 and launched the week before Whitsun. Willing hands transferred her from the lorry to a trailer and into the water. She was obviously a winner from the start even without the ballast which I recast into 28lb pigs and fitted a few weeks later.
By sheer chance she was launched just in time for the first East Coast Old Gaffers Race in which she took part. The course was an ambitious one from Osea pier to Harwich. Light airs meant that the smaller boats had to give up, not because they couldn’t have reached Harwich but because they would not have been back home in time for work on Monday. In mid July she competed the trip she was designed for, rounding the Isle of Sheppey over a weekend, a distance of nearly a hundred miles. Fairey Albacore dinghies were raced at the club and out dated sails were going cheap or even for free so there was a temptation to go Bermudian but an August Bank Holiday trip to the Ore and return convinced me that unfashionable as it was at that time, gaff rig was the best for my type of sailing. At the end of that first season I took her round to Arthur Taylor, the sailmaker at Maldon who measure the hole, drew it out in his book and after a few adjustments on the principle that what looks right is right, we agreed the new sailplan. I also ordered Whykam Martin furling gear for the headsail (she was still a sloop at this time). When a Sprite class dinghy was dismasted at the club I was given the broken mast and used part of it for a longer bowsprit to make her a cutter. This improved her performance, including easing the heavy weather helm. Later I added a homemade topsail from an old Albacore jib and soon realised why they call light weather on the east coast `topsail weather`. As soon as I could afford it, I had a new one made. A proper drop rudder was made for her similar to those supplied with the Falcon Dayboat. Over the years iron fittings have been replaced by gunmetal and bronze as funds came to hand. An article in Yachting World brought me a Sestrel hand-bearing compass and another in the new Practical Boat owner provided proper bunk cushions. The initial internal arrangements were altered several times over the first few years and the primus stove replaced by Gaz together with a Gaz radiant heater. No engine was fitted but paddles are kept on either side deck to help her head round when beating in very narrow waters. A tow -rope for canal work and a quant for the Norfolk Broads completed the most important item in my life except my wife and family.
Chapter 9 Coals From Newcastle
Two hundred years ago they opened a canal from Heybridge on the River Blackwater to Chelmsford, the county town of Essex. The main cargo was coal, black diamonds brought south from the Yorkshire and Durham coalfields into the broad estuary by plodding colliers under sail. The railways long ago took over the coal trade from the colliers and by the nineteen seventies even the Baltic timber ships forsook the sea lock at Heybridge, preferring to unload at Wivenhoe on the River Colne and send their cargo to Chelmsford down the A12 thus killing the last commercial freight on the canal. The canal is still a private company and the proprietors decided to make the canal available for limited use by pleasure craft. To celebrate, the Inland Waterways Association organised a rally at Chelmsford over Whitsun 1973 with a prize for the most interesting voyage to the rally. What better way to win that prize than by sailing north to Newcastle and fetching a few lumps of coal?
It meant a journey of about three hundred and fifty nautical miles. Time was the enemy. All I had was a three week holiday before the rally which would have to be used on the well tried and trusted cruising basis of one week outward bound and two bound home irrespective of how far along the coast I reached. To help things along, I decided to try to get the boat round to the North Norfolk coast at Easter, which was late that year. Prospects looked grim as I waded out through the mud to my mooring with load after load of gear on the evening before Good Friday. There was a gale warning out for most sea areas and an icy wind was screaming out of the north, just the way I wanted to go. Long experience has taught me that it is always worth a try and I bedded down in the hope of better things with the 0030 hrs forecast. No joy there! High tide was at 0300hrs so the boat would be dry by 0600hrs. All I could do was to drop down to the rivermouth and see how things developed during the day so I left the mooring close reefed at 0450 hrs with the first signs of dawn. Close reefed, Shoal Waters made fine progress to Osea half an hour later to find a barge at anchor and a few yachts moored east of the pier, an ideal spot when the wind is in the north. The wind was so cold that there ought to a law against it and I thought enviously of them snug and warm in their bunks. As I passed the tired old Thirslet Beacon at 0540 hrs large patches of shingle were already high out of the water and a few grateful seabirds were stretching their legs. Forty minutes later Shoal Waters sailed into smooth water in the lee of the Long Nass Spit off Mersea to anchor for breakfast.
The 0630 hrs forecast gave northerly 5/7 locally 8. Towards low water I beached on the hard at Old Mersea City to refill the water cans and change the Gaz cylinder. It was by no means empty but this was no time to be caught without hot food and drink. I also bought a packet of paper hankerchiefs in case I developed the streaming cold brought into the office that week by a colleague but fortunately this proved unnecessary. Any germs I might have been carrying must have frozen to death! When the boat refloated, I sailed through the Besom fleet and along the edge of Mersea Flats to Brightlingsea in the first sunshine of the holiday to await the 1400 hrs forecast. There was no gale warning but the northerly wind force 6/7 was still forecast veering northeast 5/6. It was worth a try. With wind just west of north, I had a fine passage along the coast reaching Walton Pier at 1640 hrs before coming hard on the wind. The only other craft in company was the Ocean Youth club’s seventy-two foot ketch Master Builder and her companionship was rather shortlived. On the dead run down to Colne Point she didn’t take much out of me but once round the Colne Bar buoy and onto a reach, she went off like a scalded cat, assisted by the first of the regular rain-squalls of the afternoon. At 1750 hrs I was off the Stonebanks buoy and facing a long beat into Harwich over the last of the spring ebb; why not carry on to the River Deben? It was another five miles in the right direction and at the present rate of progress I would be over the dangerous shifting shingle bar well before dark.
The 1800 hrs forecast gave north 5/6 and seven locally. Who but a hardened sailor would have believed that in twenty minutes time I would be shaking out the reefs and setting the big jib (she was still a sloop at this time) as the wind died and the sea smoothed out rapidly in the shelter of the Suffolk coast? I ended up sitting to leeward as darkness closed in and the little craft glided through the smooth water over the first of the flood tide, working her way inshore and watching progress by lining the Martelleo Towers on the shore against the woods on the skyline. Suddenly I was moving swiftly towards the entrance, the skyline dropped below the coast, and the roar of the surf increased for there was still a heavy ground swell. Now I was in a pretty pickle! My first trip into the Deben this year and I had no idea how the entrance had changed over the winter. My glasses (Canadian 7 x 50 ex WD), picked out the surf on the northern banks but no sign of the entrance buoy which as I noted next day, stands above the water at least fifteen inches. I went inshore and approached over the southern bar where there was no swell, only a low line of surf ahead. Suddenly she scraped on the shingle. I tried to push her head round with the idea of sailing out again into deeper water but the tide was racing in and the oar that I had driven into the shingle thumped me hard in the ribs as the boat swung round. There was only one answer, off shoes, socks and trousers and over the side. After a few moments pushing and tugging, she swept over into the low line of surf, which was caused by smooth water rushing over the bank meeting the rougher water racing into the river along the main channel. Then it was just a case of beating back and forth as the tide bore me northwest through the narrows by the ferry hard. There was no time to dry and dress. The seat, where I had climbed back in was too wet to sit on so I stood at the helm with my shirt tails flapping. Strangely, I felt warmer than I had all day and the expression `a picture of rude health` flashed across my mind. Half an hour later Shoal Waters was anchored on the southern edge of the Horse Sand and her owner, well topped up with Horlicks and biscuits, was snuggling down into his sleeping bag.
Continued
