Chapter 2 Learning to cruise

On the first Saturday afternoon in April I travelled down to Heybridge armed with tools and paint to fit out for the coming season. She seemed to have survived the winter well and I fiddled about without actually getting much done that first afternoon. There were many other craft in the Ballast Hole, mostly over against the Blackwater S.C. clubhouse. Zephyr was on a tongue of land that had once been the seawall before colliers trading into Maldon and Heybridge canal basin had dug out the present little bay for ballast to steady them on the long trip north. There was a broads style craft called Shrimp near me whose owner had come to live in this area from Lincoln and brought his craft with him to use on tidal waters. He soon found that the fin keel was a serious disadvantage and that the lifting cabin top lifted automatically, out by the Bench Head buoy at the rivermouth once the wind piped up. After a season she vanished from this area. In sharp contrast was a large white boat called Corrie whose six foot keel lay in a hole dug in the mud at the edge of the saltings. She belonged to Jim Robertson, an engineer who had been unfit for service with the armed forces and had spent the war years training sea cadets in his lovely centreboard yacht Petrel. After the war he had raced her with the Royal Ocean Racing Club but she was clearly unsuitable, even after conversion to bermudian rig. Now he had purchased this craft, which was a Clyde Thirty, a sort of eight meter without the girth measurement, built in Edwardian times for day racing. Friendships formed on the saltings that spring were to last for many years of east coast and offshore racing until such boats as Corrie were priced right out of the game.

The first task on Zephyr was to remove the cutwater and use it as a pattern to make another. Unfortunately when I removed it, the rotten wood fell to pieces. To shape the new wood I painted inside the stempost and plank ends and repeatedly offered it up, rasping wood away wherever it touched. Three, seven inch by a quarter mild steel bolts, the longest that I could buy, were used to fasten it but I never managed to fix the lower one properly. Over the years I often wondered how much strength they had left in them but when she was broken up in 1963 they were still in fine order. Then I burnt off all the paint in the manner of all new owners of wooden boats and started from scratch, a thing that I have never done since or expect to do again. I have long realised that if paint will not fall off, it is best left on. New paint put on damp wood in spring often comes off again within the year, but this time I was lucky for Easter 1949 was the warmest of the century and by Monday evening she began to look very smart. My thoughts turned to cruising and I decided to try a trip to the Isle of Wight.

  Immediately after Easter I gave notice at work for the end of April and began to sort out the details. Over the winter I made a host of plans and sketches of lifting cabin tops and ingenious tents but they all cost far too much money so I eventually sent off for a sheet of barrage balloon material thirty feet by twelve. After the war this material was advertised widely and it proved very watertight and durable. Keeping clothes dry was the next problem. This was solved by the purchase of a couple of ex W.D. steel ammunition boxes twenty inches by thirty-six inches and eleven inches deep. They were a godsend and in some ways the most important part of my equipment. For cooking I bought a primus stove and a book on cookery for men only. Things began to look up. A galvanised two-gallon water can at twenty-three shillings and sixpence made a big hole in the funds for this was before the days of polythene cans. In fact I hung on at work for another week to help them out and made final preparations to leave on Saturday the 7th of May.

Saturday morning found me flat out on my back with stomach trouble that kept me in bed until noon. The breeze at Heybridge soon cheered me as I packed my gear on board during the afternoon while the tide was out. Almost by chance, I took along my knee length waterboots and these turned out to be essential for the type of cruising I was to do. I admit that my enthusiasm was not quite so great as it had been but there was no turning back to those friends whom, I felt certain, were expecting to see me within a week. It was a fine evening with a light breeze from the northeast that gradually freshened and veered east. The sun sank behind me in a crimson glow as Zephyr dropped down the river while the moon rose bold and clear on the starboard bow. My plan was to moor somewhere down river and sail on the ebb at eight in the morning to Burnham, but as I was not particularly tired, I sailed in the brilliant moonlight until long after midnight and then ran back to anchor west of Tollesbury Pier at about 0100hrs. Tell the truth, I toyed with the idea of a night passage to the Crouch but my nerve failed when I pointed the bowsprit into the blackness beyond Bradwell. It was a grand night so I laid the tent on the floorboards and gazed up at the stars until sleep overtook me

  The first signs of dawn were visible in the eastern sky when I woke at 0400hrs. My back ached and the cold of the night had got into my bones. I put the tent up and made a cup of tea. This was the first time that I had ever used a primus stove, for as a non-smoker, I had not had any matches with which to try it out before. It looked very bright and shiny as I read the instructions by the light of my torch but it was not to stay that way long in the salt air. Tea was made by sprinkling tea leaves onto the water in an ex army mess tin as it came to the boil. After standing for a few minutes, the leaves sink to the bottom and the liquid could be poured off into an ex army pint mug. While drinking my first brew, it suddenly occurred to me to lash the oars on the foredeck from the bowsprit to the shrouds in which fashion I carried them for many years. When I came to get the anchor, I coiled the ten fathoms of coir rope on the foredeck, hooked the anchor round the sampson post with the shank across the foredeck and the stock vertical outside the rubbing strake. At first I put a lashing round the warp but later gave up the practice for it never moved even during the foulest weather. Whilst twisting and turning among my belongings I noticed that one of the steel boxes could be fitted alongside the starboard side of the sternsheets against the centre thwart. The gap left aft between the box and the stern seat could be filled in with the bucket covered by the hatch cover from the transom locker. This gave a reasonably flat level area over six feet long and at least two and a half feet wide on which I slept for the next few weeks. It was hard but a shirt folded under my hip bone helped a lot. After another spell of dozing rather than actual sleep, I found a lovely morning with the promise of a breeze from the northwest. While waiting for the tide to turn I busied myself checking the one-inch Ordinance Survey maps of the area and the yachtsman’s chart of the Essex Rivers. A couple of chaps were fishing off the end of the old pier and all in all, it made a very peaceful scene. At 0745 hrs I got under way as the ebb started and the trip was on.

Essex has many detractors but few of them can ever have been in the Blackwater Estuary on a fine summer morning as the mist is swallowed up by the first warm rays of the sun. West Mersea lay away to the north, a comparatively high feature for this coast and in the sheltered harbour, white sails were appearing and moving slowly out towards the open sea. Behind me Osea Island lay like a dream atoll and Tollesbury Pier itself just stood there as it has been doing for so long while the ebb tide gathered momentum about its rotten piles and fingers of gurgling water reached out towards the open sea once more. This pier was removed in the early fifties and little trace of it remains today except the overgrown track running from the shore to the village.

The wind seemed to be feeling much the same mood as myself, not particularly bothered , but the tide knew its job and was carrying me out into the blue. Progress was slow, the target piers on the Denghie Flats were in line by 1010 hrs but after this the wind rose from the northwest, backed rapidly west and then south so that I had to beat down to the famous Buxey Beacon of which I had read of so often and was now about to see for the first time. The distance down the coast from the Blackwater is about ten miles, but the distance to be sailed varies with the state of the tide and how much water one needs, for there is little indeed in the Ray Sand Channel at low water where Frank Cowper found twelve feet in 1893. (today, 2003, it dries three or four feet). Waves began to break as the wind rose and I seemed to be making little progress for the ebbing tide was against me. At noon I anchored to bail out and force myself to eat a doorstep of bread and jam. It is one thing in favour of this `dull uninteresting coast` that one can stop almost anywhere, for the bottom is not usually far away. Suddenly the wind went northwest again and I was soon rolling down on the Southwest Buxey Buoy (now renamed the Sunken Buxey) round which a number of yachts seemed to be racing. The fickle wind backed west and settled down to a fine working breeze that made Zephyr heel more than I was used to at that time. A long beat into the river Crouch taught me a lot about the need to work the tides for I had reached the River Roach two miles below Burnham by the time it turned in my favour. When this river turned westward it began to get very lively indeed and I anchored to pull down a reef before turning into the Middleway between Potton and Foulness Islands. Of course it was far too early on the tide for these creeks dry out completely. The marshes didn’t seem to have quite the magic about them of which Maurice Griffiths wrote, but I was to love them before the week was out.

The dagger plate touched regularly as the boat twisted and turned up the winding creeks. She grounded completely on the long spit that juts out from Rushley Island to separate the Middleway from Narrow Cuts so I had to get over the side to push her back towards the bridge. This was my first chance to gauge the strength of the tides here. They run very hard indeed on the first of the flood and Zephyr swept quickly down the last mile to the bridge with the fair wind. Its black skeleton suddenly loomed up above the sedge grass on the sea wall, still well above my head and stage one of the trip was over. To my surprise the tide was flowing round the southeastern tip of Rushley Island and back to the Middleway as well as straight under the bridge towards the sea. Having no dinghy, I beached for the night on firm sand, dropping the anchor behind me and taking a line to the shore. I rigged the tent feeling that I was really alone out in the wilds but was to learn different later. When turning the stove off in the morning I must have closed the tap again after releasing the pressure for the warming bowl was full of paraffin. In trying to empty the excess paraffin over the side, the silencer fell into the water and that meant no hot drink to round off the day’s sport. I seemed to have lost all taste for food so I turned in and got down to some serious sleeping. The tent at this stage was only a rough uncut sheet lashed to some hooks screwed into the topsides about a foot below the gunwale. It had a good test that night for the wind howled and I wondered if it would take off altogether. The amount of traffic over the bridge surprised me. It was only about a hundred yards away and even a bicycle set the whole thing rattling in the open silence of the marshes.

Continued.