So far the only boating I’ve done the entire year is rowing my little dinghy to harvest some luscious but otherwise inaccessible early blackberries hanging over the water.
This lovely little lapstrake boat, a Roger Oughtred design called a feather pram, is too fragile to want to knock it about on beaches as a yacht tender, so I keep it safe on our pond.
We have at last been able to book a date to put Spring Fever in the water. Most of the jobs we commissioned have been done, apart from some rigging work and a long-overdue gas service. August 18 is now the target date, the latest by a long way that we have ever launched.
The plan with Spring Fever continues to be to cruise up the east coast and base her at Woolverstone on the River Orwell near Ipswich for 6 weeks, before returning to Cowes in early October. That means relearning the short cuts across the sandbanks of the Thames Estuary, called swatchways, which is always an interesting pilotage exercise.
Nowadays as well as longstanding routes such as the Wallet Spitway, Ray Sand and the several routes across the Sunk sands, we have to learn to negotiate the way through a windfarm. The standard route back from Harwich to Ramsgate goes by a shallow passage called Foulger’s Gat and nowadays that means passing through a huge windfarm, the London Array – all perfectly legal and agreed, and even if we strayed underneath one we would feel the draft but not the rotor itself. They are a minimum 25 metres up, 10 metres higher than our mast.
We had thought of wintering on the east coast but could not find anywhere remotely as economical as Cowes, where we can stay in Shepards Marina from November to March for about £175 a month compared with £360 a month at Woolverstone and similar rates at other Orwell marinas. To think the East Coast used to be regarded as the cheap place to keep a boat….
We’ve applied to have an annual mooring again on Folly Reach on the Medina, having given ours up in January because of the plan to go to Spain and winter there – that was then.
This east coast cruise will be a bit of a nostalgia trip, because at various times over the years with various boats we have had moorings at Woolverstone, Waldringfield, Titchmarsh, Levington, Shotley and Wrabness on the River Stour, where we paid for our own to be laid. For a long time we owned both the mooring at Wrabness and a caravan in a field by the shore, a great place for children to play on the grass, on the beach and in the woods, and a convenient store for boat gear when we weren’t there.
Meanwhile, a designer is about to start laying out the 6th edition of Pass your Yachtmaster. There are many updates throughout the book, some of which have had to be quite long because of the way technology and rules have moved on, plus a whole extra chapter. We’re waiting to find out how many extra cartoons we can insert in the new material, having found some splendidly appropriate ones for the electronic age, even though much of the late Mike Peyton’s work was done before the era of charts on screens. Mike Peyton still makes me laugh because he catches the dilemmas, idiocies, mistakes and obsessions of amateur sailors so well. There are some copyright issues we hope will be sorted soon.
tide by tide 