55 years in Shoal Waters

Chapters from an unpublished book

Forward

My original aim was to sail round the world. Three things prevented me from doing so. I never had the money, I never had the time and I did have a wife and four children. Sailing the wide oceans, visiting the palm fringed atolls and sweltering tropic ports where the jungle drops down the mountainside to kiss the warm seas remains a pastime for winter evenings in the comfort of an armchair with one of endless books on the subject. Before retirement and thanks to an understanding wife, on some dozen weekends each year I was free to sail as far round the world as I liked, provided that I was back in good time to go to work on Monday morning. Did this mean just pottering about in the river with all my year’s hopes pinned on fine weather for the precious summer holiday or could I still find some real sailing year in and year out? Did I have to race to get some sort of interest, challenge and excitement? Did my modest means compel me to crew on larger craft to enjoy offshore and night sailing?

This book sets out to show the wonderful adventure playground that lays just a couple of hours from those crowded London railway stations, the maze of beautiful rivers that reach deep into the heart of the Suffolk, Kent and Essex countryside and the fascinating triangle of sandbank infested waters between Aldeburgh, Ramsgate and Canvey Island that might almost have been designed for modern small shoal draft sailing cruisers. A trip round the Whitaker Beacon at the northeasternmost edge of Foulness Sand may not have the glamour of a trip round Cape Horn, but careful research has shown that a man drowned off Southend Pier is just as dead as one drowned off the tip of South America.

In spite of the rescue services and all the modern electronic aids and gimmicks, the welfare state ends at the seawall. They may have abolished the death penalty for murdering old ladies but the death penalty is still in force for bad seamanship. Once you cast off the mooring on Friday evening for fifty hours of freedom and adventure, you are just as much on your own as any skipper of the thousands upon thousands of craft that have used these waters over the centuries. Make no mistake these have always been busy waters. The Roman corn galleys knew them in the days when we exported grain. Until the advent of the motor lorry most coastal villages and hamlets lived to the heartbeat of the twice-daily high tides. Every bank, every creek has its name and history. Men have traded this area since the beginning of recorded history. The routes they used, their short cuts, the tricks of working the winds and tides are still there for the modern yachtsman to test his skill and the ability of his craft. On the other hand the Thames Estuary is basically a safe area. You can make mistakes such as going aground on a sandbank for a few hours and merely get back to your mooring late where on other rockier parts of the coast, a similar mistake could mean almost certain loss of the vessel, and even the death of the crew. Remember the first time that the original Radio Caroline, a crummy lugger if ever there was one, broke her mooring and blew ashore near Walton on Naze in an easterly gale. She got off later under her own steam and went to Holland for repairs. There are few other parts of the coast where such a boat could have got away with it! The weekend sailor may risk death by drowning but at least he cannot be one of the dozen or so people killed on the road during his spell afloat.

Furthermore, there is to my mind the big advantage in sailing in that very few people are injured. You are either dead at the bottom of the sea or alive and on top of the world. The sheer exhilaration of sailing back to your mooring after a successful trip, whether it be an Atlantic crossing or merely your first rounding of a buoy some ten miles outside the river, has to be experienced to be believed. Some years ago H.R.H. the Prince of Wales asked,

“Can’t we do something to make mankind feel grand?”

The common love of boats, the fear of the sea and the camaraderie it engenders among all who venture thereupon is probably the best answer. Many of our hospital beds are occupied by patients who are mentally sick. How many more of us would join them if it were not for the healing effects of a brief taste of the quieter, calmer life among the creeks and marshes under the wide skies and eternally restless tides of the outer Thames EstuaryIt seems to me that in an increasingly cockeyed world, navigating a small boat is about the only thing which continues to make sense.

Charles Stock.