Chapter 8 Zephyr's Last Year
Early in l952 I secured a job as a farm bailiff in the lovely little Essex village of High Easter and Zephyr languished on the quay at Maldon. There were enough problems on land without going to sea to find them. I eventually fitted out very hurriedly in late May and spent a few weekends in the river. In September I set out with a friend one Saturday evening at high water to make a twenty-four hour round passage to Havengore, returning on Sunday evening, a trip of sixty miles in just over twenty-four hours. It was a portent of things to come but it would be a long, long time before I could follow it up.
Easter week 1953 found me dressed in the inevitable morning suit at Chelmsford Cathedral and sailing took second place for a while. Joy and I had been friends for several years and when I found her crewing a Snipe racing at the Maldon Y.C. of which I was now a member, the rest followed the normal pattern. She came on her first cruise with me in Zephyr in June that year and we had an idyllic trip to Walton, Pin Mill, Woodbridge, Battlesbridge, Bradwell and return to Maldon, sleeping ashore when possible. Unfortunately she suffered from sea sickness which fortunately never seemed to affect in her in the rivers.
1954 brought a new and very successful gadget, the Halmatic foot pump. This meant that I could steer the boat with one hand, sound with the cane with the other and keep a steady jet of bilge water over the gunwale with one foot. The constant bailing had always been a limiting factor in the endurance of cruises in Zephyr and this pump increased my range by at least twenty five per cent. At the end of May, Her Majesty the Queen was due to return from her first Royal tour of Australia and New Zealand in the brand new Royal Yacht Britainia and a big welcome was planned for her in the Thames. I got away from Maldon at 1000hrs on the Friday and beat steadily out through the Spitway and the Barrow Swatch to the Shingles Patch where I hoped to lay overnight for the light easterly wind, which had dominated the area had been dying away each night. I was a day too late, for at dusk it blew up briskly from the northeast and I ran for Whistable to anchor on the mudflats outside the harbour long after dark. At first light I got under way and beat across the estuary, failing by half a mile to get really close to the Royal Yacht which was escorted by two cruisers and then settled down to a long cold beat to get into Havengore Creek before the Broomway dried out. After a little sleep in the shelter of the River Crouch, I carried on beating out of the river into one of the blackest nights I have ever known, to reach Maldon early on the Sunday morning tide. It was a good trip, but as a wise friend said to me, “She is too old a boat for that sort of thing”. I took the hint and never left the river for many years.
Priscilla, our firstborn arrived that July. Joy was sleeping on the boat three weeks before the great day but the weather was far from kind to us this time. By now we had a car and I was able to join the boat on Saturday while Joy came down on Sunday. With the growing family and the demands of work on the land, I got less and less sailing each year. In the poor summer of 1956 Zephyr sat on a stake near her mooring and we floated her onto the saltings at the Ballast Hole near the Blackwater S.C. The time had come to give up sailing. I varnished the anchor and hung it on the wall of our sitting room as a reminder of some gloriously happy times.
In 1957 we set out for some proper family seaside excursions. After sitting on the sands at Felixstowe and Clacton twiddling our thumbs, we went back to Zephyr at Whitsun and decided to fit her out again. The dagger plate would have to go for she leaked so badly when it was used and I knew she sailed tolerably well without it. A new mainsail was essential. Joy bought me some unbleached calico as a birthday present and we set about making it up. I decided on gaff rig this time, one of the most important decisions of my life. A friend from the Blackwater S.C. gave me a mast from an eighteen foot national which I cut down to size. Part of Zephyr`s old mast became a fine new bowsprit and the upper part which had once been the boom, now became the gaff. In view of the limited time that I had for sailing, the sail was made loose footed with toggles to the mast so that I could take it home each time that I left the boat which would increase its life. Her windward performance would be poor now and make it even more difficult to get back to Maldon once the ebb set in with the prevailing westerly winds so I reluctantly left the Maldon Y.C. and joined the Blackwater S.C. a mile down river in open marshland which I found much to my liking. This enabled me to return to my mooring in clear sailing water untroubled by buildings and high ground. 0ver the next five years I spent a few hours afloat when possible but the old tub was deserted for weeks on end and often sunk at her moorings. I moved her close inshore near the club jetty where she dried for longer than she floated to give the water that leaked in time to leak out again. All the gear had to be tied in when I left her. It occurred to me that the rudder, painted green like the rest of the boat, when tied to the end of the mainsheet, would float when the boat sank to become an instant wreck buoy!
During this period racing the dinghy-racing craze hit the Blackwater and the club spent over a thousand pounds on a ramp so that the ever-lighter craft, no longer stable enough to leave out on moorings, could be launched and recovered from the yard. Together with the rest of the cruising types in the club, I considered this a scandalous waste of money for `pyramid building`, as we contemptuously described the dinghy types toiling up and down the ramp. It took several years for us to realise that the same ramp could be used to take the increasingly lighter cruisers over the sea wall to lay up for the winter instead of leaving them in mud berths round the edge of the Ballast Hole. The long-term effect of this would be to establish the Blackwater S.C. as the leading small cruiser club in the area with over a hundred boats of more than forty standard designs as well as many one offs.
1962 was a momentous year but it stared off quietly enough. Good Friday was cold and I stayed home. On Saturday I went down to the club and got Zephyr off the saltings where she had wintered as usual, for short trips on the tide over the rest of the holiday. It was the week before Whitsun when I got down to her again. The club steward suggested that I got her out of the water on one of the sturdy club trollies `to see what we could do with her`. On her way up the ramp she looked a sorry sight indeed compared with the gleaming `Albacore` dinghies which were the main club racing class at that time and I endured a barrage of witty and not so witty remarks. It was hopeless to tell them of her glorious past but found myself wondering if she could still show them a thing or two. The surprising thing was that although she leaked like a sieve when afloat, water refused to run out of her on the trolley and we had to bail out the water we hosed inside to wash her out. It was a fine week and I took two afternoons off which, together with long light evenings, gave me plenty of time to complete a refit including a lot of hot tar inside and out. Her keel was almost rotted through in two places and the patches were too many to count for my piece of mind.
In spite of my efforts, she leaked just as much when I floated her off the trolley at the weekend and I had to go back to caulking her from the inside with good stiff clay from the saltings. Of course I still had the halmatic foot pump. On Sunday I set out to sleep on board again. The cabin top had been removed to make room for the family when day sailing and the bunk had been stolen when she was left off Maldon promenade but I had a tent bought for my young son and a tiny Gaz stove. Anyway, I decided to give it a try and left the club at 0945 hrs with a northerly wind, which soon carried me down a very changed river. Tollesbury pier and the target railway on the Dengie Flats had vanished while a massive power station had been built at Bradwell. At Mersea Island I waited to see how things looked when the flood tide turned before I set off for the River Crouch. This was before the days of cheap transistor radios of course, so I had no regular forecasts. At the turn of the tide the sun came out to give me a scorching hot afternoon. I left at 1230 hrs, reaching the Bench Head buoy an hour later and turned south down the Ray Sand Channel past my old friend the Buxey Beacon to the River Crouch at 1500 hrs. It was too pleasant at sea to dive off into the river so I worked my way seaward until I could find enough water to cross Foulness Sands for a glorious run over the shallows with a rising tide to Havengore, reaching the Broomway at 1700hrs. The old magic of cruising captured me once more. Visibility was very good indeed and the Isle of Sheppey stood out clear and bold, so different from my first crossing of the Thames thirteen years ago. It occurred to me that at this sort of progress I could reach there by high water. Not today of course, but it set my thoughts working along the right lines. A number of motor craft were at anchor outside Havengore, presumable waiting for enough water over the old road which is the watershed. Almost on the road itself, a large sailing cruiser was aground and must have been there for ten or twelve hours. This was the first time that I had approached the entrance from the north and I was tickled pink to see all the other boats follow me in. It was a beat of course but the flood tide disguised my leeway. A chap on the grounded cruiser looked in amazement.
“How the hell much do you draw? He exclaimed as I swept by. There couldn’t have been more than a foot. Once in the channel, I beat to the Crouch and went up on the mud under the north shore. The tent wouldn’t fit over the boom anyway but it didn’t rain so all was well. On Monday I had an uneventful but satisfying trip home after my first cruise for years. Zephyr had covered over fifty miles in about thirtysix hours off the mooring. On the drive home my thoughts turned to a Harwich run.
A fortnight later I took a half-day on Friday to get away from the club at 1450 hrs (H.W. 1630 hrs) with the wind in the southwest. By high water I was off the power station at Bradwell and had a lively trip up the coast with the ebb. Over the Colne Bar there was the usual rough and tumble. As I sat back at the tiller, leaning partly on the side coaming and partly on the stern locker, I could feel the whole boat flexing as she bucked and twisted through the writhing water over the mile long shingle spit. I beached below Pin Mill for the night and this time I tried camping ashore. It was more comfortable but lugging my gear ashore and back to the boat next morning once the ebb had set in was a struggle. Back at the club, the local blacksmith made a metal rod for me to put across the boat level with the mast in order to strengthen her. While I stood knee deep in mud fitting this important item an old chap came along the sea wall and commenting on the gooey mud. I explained that the mud was kind to her hull for she was probably as old as I was.
“Old as you are!” he exclaimed, taking out his pipe and spitting over the sea wall, “she is as old as the two of us put together!” More food for thought.
On the seventh of July 1962 the first race for sailing barges on the River Blackwater since 1936 was sailed. The last annual Thames race had been run the previous year and the famous racing barges Sara, Dreadnaught and Veronica were deliberately broken up to signify the end of the era of sail on the east Coast. Other minds differed and turned to the long forgotton local races. The last working sailing barges had been sold off to private owners and several had been restored to some extent. The first that I remember was a barge with the appropriate name of Memory, which moored near me at Heybridge. Eight barges entered for the Blackwater Race and excitement locally was high. It was an early start, almost calm in the warm light of early morning. As we drifted down to the starting line off Osea pier, tanned topsails climbed lofty topmasts and mainsails dropped as the brails were eased to the slow clink, clink of anchor windlasses. It was like an old Dutch master’s painting come to life. The course was down river with the ebb tide, round a buoy beyond the river mouth and return to finish off Maldon Quay with the flood. In fact the wind was far too light for racing and shortly before high water that afternoon the first of them were still slowly beating past Osea pier, four miles from the finishing line. Watching from the Blackwater S.C., the chances of any of them finishing before the ebb set in looked very slim indeed but the barges had no such fears for their rigging was covered with gossamer silk cobwebs and that means one thing and one thing only on this coast; wind from the southeast.
I sailed from the club towards them in a light air from the northwest. Suddenly something was different! I snapped up my glasses and was thrilled to see the barges racing home, each with a bone in its teeth. As the fine afternoon onshore breeze reached Zephyr I turned up Colliers Reach for Maldon. By the time I drew level with the lock into the basin of the Chelmsford canal, the first three hulls came into view round the corner of Northey Island; Memory, Spinnaway C. and Marjory. The sheer grandeur of it all sent tears of nostalgia running down my cheeks as Zephyr crossed the finishing line just behind Marjory the winner, and anchored over on the north shore to watch the rest come home in the next seventeen minutes, still the best finish ever. Everyone agreed that it had been a great success and together with the first East Coast Old Gaffers race a year later, proved to be the catalyst to launch a growing interest in old craft and the need to restore and preserve both them and the knack of handling them.
Continued
