Chapter 14 Lighters on the Sand
It was the day of the full moon and the spring ebb pouring out from the River Crouch left the entrance buoys struggling and swirling in the racing tide as it swept northeast towards the tall north sector, cardinal Sunken Buxey Buoy two miles away. The only boat in sight, the little green gaff cutter Shoal Waters, had enjoyed a swift trip down stream from Burnham, and now swung to port round the spherical yellow buoy marking the entrance to the notoriously shallow Ray Sand Channel (the Rays’n), between the mile wide mudflats fringing the shore and the extensive Buxey Sand. I checked my watch, reached for the sounding cane and began to swing it like a walking stick, more as a ritual than in fear of grounding, for I have been making this trip regularly for over fifty of my seventy five years and knew that there would be water enough for another hour yet. One hundred years ago Frank Cowper found twelve feet here at low water springs for his book `Sailing Tours`. Shoal Waters, who only draws twelve inches with the plate up, could always get through when she was first launched in 1963. Now the southern end dries four or five feet and gets shallower each year as the tail of the Buxey Sand grows out southwest towards the coast at Shore Ends, leaving the famous great iron seamark, the Buxey Beacon, isolated in a lonely bay. For several minutes, less and less of the cane disappeared beneath the water at each plunge but then it began to go deeper again until suddenly, the bottom was comfortably out of reach. Now the cane could be stowed away for this is the watershed. The elaborate fleur-de-lis on the points card of the ridiculously large brass binnacle compass settled opposite the lubbers line. This was a chance to reach into the tiny cabin and set the kettle going for a brew up before it was time to look out for the next mark, a tall iron post topped with two large black cones base to base to indicate that it is on the eastern side of one of the four wrecks placed on the sands as targets when it was a wartime bombing range.
If the eighty-pound iron plate, three quarters of the way down, whispered it would be just a case of lifting it a little and easing over to starboard into slightly deeper water. By the time the eastern sector beacon drew abeam, another on the northeasternmost wreck would be visible against the Mersea shore. All I needed to do was to log the time spent sailing between the two beacons. A similar time on the same bearing would bring me to the northern fringe of St Peters flats and the deep water of the outer River Blackwater, well inside the Bench Head buoy. Once there, I would alter course northwest to find a snug berth for the night among the creeks at West Mersea or Bradwell to catch up on the sleep lost when I left my drying mooring at Heybridge some fourteen hours before.
This left me plenty of time to watch the late September sun set over the low seawall as flocks of seabirds forsook the wheat stubbles ashore to feed on the teeming invertebrates and crustacean that lived in the mud and sand exposed by the rapidly retreating tide. No villages grace the ten miles of wild coastline along the eastern edge of the Denghie Hundred. Even the local farms cower a mile or so inland, safe from the winter fury of the southern North Sea. I swung the powerful glasses northeast and confirmed that the black triangle two miles away was the Buxey Beacon, now a cardinal mark instead of the bare pole with a T shaped topmark made famous by writers such as Cooke and Griffiths. Once it marked the western edge of the sand and was used by sailing barges cutting over the Ridge and up the Rays’n instead of the longer route through the Spitway between the Buxey sands. Now it stands neglected except for an occasional adventurous yachtsman on a courtesy call. In the far distance could be seen the white sails of yachts taking the longer, deeper route between these two popular rivers. Gazing shorewards again I suddenly sat up with a start! A series of dark hard, oblong shapes broke the gentle line of the seawall shimmering in the golden autumn haze. Careful examination as they drew abeam showed them to be lighters, the sort once seen in hundreds on the London River. There were ten of them, parallel to the shore and several hundred yards out from the seawall. The jib of a crane loomed above the hull at the northern end. This was ridiculous! Nothing ever happened on this bit of the coast. The Roman legions left their fort at Orthona early in the fifth century and Bishop Cedd built the little chapel that still carries his name in the gateway two hundred years later. Sailing barges loaded stacks of hay ten feet high on deck for London’s hungry draft horses from lonely outfalls and just before the second world war the Royal Air Force established a firing and bombing range here of which the four wrecks are the only remnants. Lighters! A crane! This riddle of the sand called for further investigation as soon as time and tide served.
On Friday morning a fortnight later, Shoal Waters was ready to leave her mooring at Heybridge as soon as the incoming tide lifted her at half flood. The lighters were twelve miles away and dried an hour or two after high water. With a good breeze it would have been possible to reach them before they dried but the wind stayed light and fickle. When the lighters came into view as I rounded Sales Point, they were already dry. The little gaff cutter worked her way south between the northern wrecks until she came to rest sitting comfortably on the mud like a large duck to wait for the night tide. At least it was a fine chance for an afternoon nap.
When I woke it was already dark. A brilliant moon shone out of the clear sky, giving the mud and sand a magic lustre. The bones of the northeast wreck, standing out black against the loom of Clacton’s lights, invited me out for an evening stroll. I remembered to put up the anchor light before deserting the cosy warmth of the cabin for the eerie silence of the side sands. The steady thud of my seaboots on the firm sand was interrupted at times with cheerful splashes as they hit the shallow pools. Now and then a startled seabird fluttered up into the darkness. The inevitable cormorant sentries guarding the top of the beacon flapped away resentfully as I reached the wreck. All this had once been a wooden minesweeper. The hull had been recognisable into the sixties but was now rapidly disintegrating under the twice-daily assaults of the hungry sea. Shorewards, the black hulls of the lighters stood out against the grey of the seawall. Suddenly a soft `fru, fru` sound made me realised that the tide was already sweeping back in and I hurried back towards the lonely anchor light.
Just after midnight the voyage to the lighters was completed. In the moonlight they looked frightfully big and menacing. Working down from the north, the first seemed empty, the next nearly full of black material, almost certainly honest Essex mud, and the southernmost level full of a lighter coloured material with a strange sheen. Nothing would have tempted me to board them in the dark. That would have to wait for daylight so I anchored a hundred yards outside them to sleep away the rest of the night.
A fine sunrise straight out of the sea brightened up the mudflats next morning as I tramped across the mud to the lighters. They were obviously here to stay, for small holes had been cut into the bow and stern buoyancy compartments, holes that it was not difficult to imagine as eyes, which made the great black hulls look even more like stranded whales. The crane was on dumb lighter, with another alongside it at the northern end of the line. Mud was obviously being brought here to fill the lighters as nothing was being dug locally. Further inspection southwards showed that they were being filled to the level of the decks with mud. This was covered with polythene sheeting and then the lighter was topped up brim full with shingle. A flimsy sheet of plastic netting completed the job. For a time at least! By high water, the waves were lapping the sidedecks and it was obvious to any seaman that the first easterly blow would lift most of the shingle out of the lighters onto the mud to leeward. All this was clearly an expensive game. Why? Who was paying for it?
A wide fringe of saltmarsh protects most of the ten miles of coastal seawall between the Rivers Crouch and Blackwater from the direct assault by on-shore gales. In places these saltings are over half a mile wide. The tides cover them and reach the seawall for an hour or two on a few days each fortnight just after a full or new moon. Here alone, the smooth mud and sand runs right up to the foot of the seawall. Along the rest of the coast the waves will already have been partly tamed by the off-lying banks, which dry at low water. Only here is there open water all the way through the Wallet Channel between the holidaymaker’s beaches of the Tendring Hundred and the long Gunfleet sand northeast to Denmark. The worst gales come from the northeast. Just here the waves have three hundred miles of drift before hurling themselves at the fragile shield of concrete faced clay that protects the rich marshes of maritime Essex. Thus the protective role of the beached and ballasted lighter is clear but why the expensive shingle? In my wandering over the years I had noticed the growing concern of the Royal Society for the Protection of birds with the dearth of nesting sites for little terns. About a third of the north European population breeds in Great Britain giving us a population of something over two thousand pairs each summer. Well over half of them chose the southeast and nest in small colonies on shingle beaches along the shore, the very beaches so popular with the growing and increasingly leisured, human population. This area is very isolated and nests would be safe from people but I am afraid that the lighters would need to be at least four feet higher above chart datum to survive an easterly blow that coincided with a spring tide. This was a good idea but I am afraid it was not going to work.
A second visit early next season was top priority. A good westerly breeze enabled me to make a night passage from the mooring to scrape onto the mud inshore of the lighters just as the tide left. Once again a bright sunrise warmed me as I walked across the mud to see what the winter had done. The plastic nets were in shreds. Most of the shingle was heaped up against the stranded hulls on the landward side as I had anticipated. Even the polythene sheeting over the mud had been lifted in places. A tramp to the sea wall revealed a sign from the Anglian Water Authority proudly proclaiming their part in the scheme together with the R.S.P.B. As I had guessed, the aim was coastal protection and nesting sites for birds.
Already the tides are redesigning the drainage pattern so that water can come and go through the gaps between the lighters. In places, channels have been scoured away in the mud to reveal a few wartime aerial cannon shell cases along the old target railway line, long since collapsed into the mud. The level of the mud is certainly building up between the lighters and the shore but the hulks themselves are taking a real battering. When I visited them in 2002 several had already had the coamings wrenched away.
I visit the little creek running in towards the old chapel at the northern end of the flats most years and have been dismayed to see the erosion taking place year by year. I wonder if this is in any way due to a change in the method of gathering cockles. Looking from seaward, the edge of the saltings seem to be covered in patches of bright gold sand. Closer inspection shows that they are one hundred per cent cockle shells, mostly broken, washed up by the waves. Over ten years ago I found some sturdy stakes on the saltings and drove a line of them just on the landward edge of the strips of shingle. Today they are all on the seaward side. The cockle shells seem to take about a year or eighteen months to be washed over a given spot, during which time they smother and kill off all the rough grass that binds the saltings together. Once faced with bare mud, Father Neptune wades in tearing off great lumps and dashing them to pieces. Areas with no cockle cover stand out like miniature promontories. Once the cockle gatherers beached their craft and raked the sand to find the cockles at low tide. Now big powerful boats from as far afield as Kings Lynn and Boston sail over the sands as soon as there is enough water, with giant vacuum cleaners that suck up the top few inches of sand and mud to run it through a sieve which takes out the cockles but lets through the broken shells and other small stuff. Does this method mean more empty shells to be driven ashore by the next gale? Whatever the cause, the assault on dear old Essex is very sad but we are fighting back.
Three brightly polished cannon shell cases stand on my mantelpiece as I write this, souvenirs of my own `Riddle of the Sands`.
