Chapter 1 Learning to sail
“Of course there is the Zephyr, “said a voice in the twilight as I waited for a bus in the little Essex coastal town of Maldon.
“Her gear is all right but her hull is a ripe as pear!”
My heart took a jump at these words and sank. They were not intended for me but I couldn’t resist the temptation to listen when I heard them talking about the dearth of small boats. You see, I had just bought the sixteen foot half decked gunter rigged sloop Zephyr that very evening.
It was the Friday evening before Whitsun 1948 and the purchase price of seventy-five pounds (including an outboard motor which I later sold for ten pounds) represented a couple of years steady saving during my spell in the Royal Marines just after the war. If my memory serves me correctly, pay had started at eighteen shillings a week and rose to twenty-eight shillings during the second year. Saving this modest sum had earned me the title of `Baron Stock` on the mess deck of H.M.S.Buchan Ness, head-quarters ship of 416 Flotilla, Royal Marine Landing Craft. While I would never advise anyone to buy a craft without a survey, thank my lucky stars I didn’t get further advice on Zephyr for she had been on the market for a long time and I would almost certainly have been put off buying her.
I suppose that the story really started on Liverpool Street Station in 1944. At the time I was employed plotting merchant shipping in the Pacific Ocean by My Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty and had developed a keen interest in this fascinating area as the American forces stormed from island to island. The previous evening I had found a copy of the National Geographic Magazine which told of the voyage of the yacht `Teddy` from Norway across the oceans to New Zealand and I instantly determined to sail round the world myself. The first thing to do was to learn more about small yachts and there on Smith`s bookstall was paperback titled `Yachting on a Small Income` by Maurice Griffiths, price sixpence. I still have that battered volume. This led me on to the wonderful collection of sailing books in the three branches of the Westminster Library and I soon got to know the work of all the popular sailing writers, in particular, that of Francis B. Cooke who seemed to me to have captured the very spirit of messing about in boats better than any other writer.
We worked on the ground floor of the bank building between the Admiralty proper and the Whitehall theatre. The section called Trade Division M4 was run by naval officers and included a couple of dozen retired master mariners, all of who had started in sail. They worked out the probable daily position of each ship and convoy while a horde of teenagers, of which I was one, handled the stream of signals and moved the pins representing each ship or convoy on large wall charts so that the latest information was available night and day for the War Room. The Atlantic was of course the main plot but the Indian and Pacific Ocean plots were coupled together under the control of one Lt. P---- who had two driving interests in life, pretty girls and greyhounds, in each case the faster the better. I fairness he was an extra master mariner.
His obsession with dog racing was shared by the chap in charge of the office and they were very good friends. We lads on the Pacific and Indian Ocean plots got a very real benefit out of this for the prettiest girls who came into the office were always allocated to our section. It was no good the young ladies being fast round the desk, they had to be fast round the chart tables which required a lot more staying power.
At times we were very busy (and of course the department worked seven days a week), but there were plenty of slack periods when we listened to sea stories from the old timers, plotted voyages from Basil Lubbock`s `Last of the Windjammers` on the charts and generally soaked up the seafaring traditions of our nation in its finest days. We followed the island war in the Pacific on large-scale charts, which were freely available (no one ever asked why we wanted then), and I carefully copied hundreds of ports and harbours, atolls and anchorages on filing cards. Alas, they all remain in my desk unused. There was a branch of the Sea Cadet Corps at the Admiralty and coached by the old timers, three of us passed the petty officer examination in record time. Little time afloat was possible apart from a few evenings rowing a whaler on the tidal Thames and summer camps at Haldon Moor above the lovely River Teign in Devon where I managed to get my first hour sailing in a lugsail dinghy. It was great fun but at four shillings an hour, time had to be severely limited.
With the end of the war in September 1945, my planned enlistment for training in the Fleet Air Arm was cancelled and I was offered a chance of transferring to the Royal Marines on the `Y` scheme entry which I accepted actually joining up in early January 1946.
Throughout 1946 our potential officer squad was whittled down and I was chucked out on the last week before the passing out parade. After a month or two at Eastney barracks at Portsmouth I was drafted to H.M.S. Rosneath , the landing craft base on the Clyde, where I became a deckhand on an L.C.A.(landing craft assault). There were about one hundred and fifty bootnecks, three hundred matlots and most important of all, some one hundred and eighty Wrens in residence. Each morning the population was doubled or even trebled by an avalanche of dockyard mateys who arrived from Glasgow and Gourock in a fleet of ferries (one of them ex channel) and just disappeared among the ships and shore facilities. It was the middle of the terrible winter of 1947 with all its power, fuel and food shortages. This had been an American camp and they had left over two years supply of paraffin for the space heaters in the huts, which were spread among the woods onshore. There were two cinemas, a Church of Scotland canteen, a dance hall and several bars not to mention the lovely Gare Lock with its fleet of `Dragons` and six and eight metre yachts.
At the base we had the seventy-two foot ex German racing yacht Orion, the scratch boat of the Royal Ocean racing Club in 1947. During the summer the Myth of Malham was launched by the engineering officer, Cdr. Illingworth, to win the Fastnet race a few weeks later. Two other new boats caused excited comment at this time, the Fairey Firefly and the Swordfish (later fitted with a wooden plate and renamed the Albacore`). At the base we had naval whalers and naval fourteen footers but there seemed little opportunity to get out sailing. Had I know what I do today, it was just a question of going to Cdr. D E Chair in charge Orion`, and just saying that I wanted to sail, but I lacked the confidence to do so for the first few months. Then somehow I discovered that there were civilian staff to see that anyone taking out the fourteen footers took the right gear and brought it back afterwards and that before leaving and when returning to the base one had to report to the Officer of the Watch in the control tower but there was no machinery to say who could or could not take out a craft.
On Sunday the 3rd of August 1947, my twentieth birthday, I went out sailing in charge of a boat for the first time after three years of solid bookwork. My companion was not much interested but had nothing better to do. There was little wind but it was a start. Monday, August bank Holiday, (at that time still the first Monday in August), was a glorious day and I booked a dinghy again. This time my mate Tilson, a cynical Irishman came along and we had a fine sail. I see from my diary that we were delighted to find the Wrens sunbathing on their private beach. More important, I made my first mistake, going alongside the jetty at the Church of Scotland canteen on the windward side with the tide setting onto it. On Tuesday the fourteen footers were reserved for the officers for their weekly race so we took out the twenty-seven foot whaler but there was little wind and the two of us had a hard row back against the ebb tide, which aroused my interest in tides.
On Wednesday a difficult decision had to be taken, either to go sailing or to the weekly Scottish dance. I must confess that the lure of the fair sex won but a resolution appeared in the discovery of Anne, our pay clerk, who was keen on sailing and she became my sail companion afloat for the rest of the season. My regular entries in the dinghy booking list was soon noticed and we had some wonderful afternoon trips down the Clyde on Orion. At the end of September the daily orders included an appeal for crew to take an eighty-five ton gaff ketch from Dumbarton to the Channel Islands. The skipper was an ex mosquito pilot who was trying to make his living sailing professionally. For crew he got a naval officer and myself who had sailed but never cruised and an officer’s steward from the landing craft depot ship Buchan Ness on which we lived, who realised that he would never get to sea in the navy (she was reputed to be aground on empty milk tins) and thought he would like a trip on a yacht. He knew nothing, realised he knew nothing, did just what he was told and was in fact a most useful member of the crew. It wasn’t a record passage but there can never have been a more enjoyable one. We arrived in St Helier in warm autumn weather at the end of the glorious summer of 1974. Back at the base once more the early darkness prevented evening sailing but I continued to get out on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. On the 30th of November I went out for my last trip on the Clyde before going to Chatham for demob ready for Christmas.
It was out of the question to go back to office life so I took a years training in farming at Chelmsford in Essex where I had spent the first three years of the war as an evacuee. Getting afloat was the problem and for some reason it never occurred to me to join a sailing club but of course there were not so many about in those days and those that had survived the war were not very active. I scrutinised the papers each week and thus became the owner of the sixteen foot gunter sloop `Zephyr`. Post war prices had rocketed and a cabin boat was beyond my means. She had originated from Poole on the south coast and I am told she was clearly amateur built, firstly as an open boat and then decked in very well and tastefully as a halfdecker. She had a short bowsprit and a dagger plate, which weighed about eighty pounds. The planking was sound in most places but of course, she leaked round the garboards once I loosened up the pitch in the bottom planks by hard sailing. The cutwater had rotted through completely and been covered with brass plate which in fact I failed to notice. There were lead badges on the corners of the transom covering you can guess what. No mention was made at this time but I later discovered a lead keel underneath which I eventually found weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. One slight snag was that the rudder was fixed and reached a few inches below the keel which meant that when the plate was up, the rudder was the first thing to touch the mud (or hard sand).
It was a late afternoon tide on Saturday. I sailed up and down off Maldon Promenade with two reefs in, finding that she handled well. Next day, Whit Sunday, my brother joined me for the day to get away from Maldon on the early tide and go down river for the day to return with the evening high water. My diary for that day is a stirring tale of the sea and I think I had best quote it direct:-
16/5 Sunday. Up early at 0620 – a glorious morning, left at 0655 and cycled to Maldon – picked up some papers, bottles of Tizer and down to the boat. – Heaved ourselves out on the boat’s anchor line and made a perfect get away. Down stream and round the point - then a snapping and fluttering as the jib halyard carried away. We tried to get alongside another boat to repair it but were waved off so we beached – for eight hours – a long lazy time. Bill was very bored – wind increasing. I fixed a stake into the mud (no anchor) with a line to our stern. It looked like being a sticky journey so Bill walked round (to Maldon). The tide rolled in and began to break over her. Could my stake hold. I jumped over and pushed. At last she slid back, round on the line, I heaved her up to it slowly – down rudder, a job with the waves breaking on the stern. - plate stuck, hoisted the jib, sheet in hand, out knife and cut the line. She hesitated, picked up and very slowly eased away from the shore. I eased the sheet and got out into the stream. I looked behind, around, at a large yacht manoeuvring under motor – round to Maldon, picked up Bill, more sailing and ashore, cleaned her down. Well she is far from perfect – the boom is low and the bowsprit awkward. Her hull seems good. Very little turbulence at high speeds. Must get an anchor and sweeps.
The point that does not come out in the account is the very interesting one that all our mishaps took place just above the lock gates at Heybridge which gave a total distance covered for the return trip of less then two miles! After that day’s exciting sport we decided to spend Whit Monday at home recovering.
Laying a mooring was the next task. A local builder cast me couple of concrete blocks weighing about sixty pounds each with rings in the top for eight shillings the pair. The following Saturday I took them along the promenade in a borrowed wheel barrow to lay them. The position had been agreed with the water bailiff and the yearly charge was to be ten bob. Carrying the blocks out through the mud was really hard work until I realised that if I turned them over so that I pulled them along by the chain from underneath, they skimmed along almost effortlessly. For some reason I could not get down to take her onto the mooring on Sunday so Monday evening Peter, a school chum who was employed on the same farm, came along to find out what sailing was all about. After a few snags getting away, such as the lacing on the yard coming adrift and the parallel balls falling onto the foredeck as I hoisted the mainsail again, we got away at a fine rate with a westerly wind and decided to go behind Northey Island not realising that there was a raised road across to the island which the chart makers knew nothing about! We hit it with a real old bang and this brought home to me the big disadvantage of a dagger plate over the centre board which is pivoted at its forward end and will lift back into the hull on its own. The front of the case had been levered forward and water was spurting in. We got the plate up, the mainsail gybed and as she scraped on the road, I jumped overboard in the best tradition of all sailing books and pushed her over into deep water on the seaward side of the road. For some reason which seems inexplicable now, we did not sail back over the road but set off right round the island bailing hard all the way back to the mooring. Thank heaven she would be dry on the mud for longer than she would be afloat filling! This, in the years ahead, would become the basic principle for mooring `Zephyr`.
Continued.
