After leaving the boat in Cowes for a few days for the force sevens to blow over (see previous post) we returned still undecided about where to go: south to the Channel Islands and down to St Malo? But it’s already the French holiday season, the English one is starting and there’ll be packed moorings and marinas everywhere, plus the new customs and immigration bureaucracy.
Furthermore, it looks from the forecast as if the first three days after arriving will be spent sheltering somewhere. After that we’ll be worrying about finding a weather window to get back to Cowes a few days later.
There’s nothing quite so much fun as messing around jumping off boats on a hot day.
Here Seb and Xan are having a great time leaping from Spring Fever at The Rocks, a beach on the River Deben where we anchored.
There was a strong tide running, so we set up a rope on a fender and let the dinghy out a long way so there were safety lines to grab.
Those in the picture below weren’t quite long enough, because once Xan didn’t quite make it back to them when he swam away after jumping from the bow. Ben took him down to the next anchored boat where they were helped out of the water and into our dinghy when I arrived.
We doubled the length of the lines and they went on jumping. I joined the fun in another session later in the afternoon. By then the water had reached almost 25 degrees as it ebbed down river after sitting on the mudflats further up.
Ruth had joined us at Ramsholt for a morning away from her work-at-home laptop, and we ferried her ashore to walk back along the river bank. She had a full afternoon’s work to do back at Bawdsey, where she was staying with Caroline – one of the mixed blessings of lockdown is employers’ willingness to let staff work from anywhere with wifi.
Ruth after landing at The Rocks
After swimming, we picked up a mooring at Ramsholt and went ashore for a walk and for drinks with Caroline on the terrace of the idyllically-set pub.
Chris ready to go ashore at Ramsholt
A few days earlier, Indigo and Will were on board with us, and here she is showing her steering skill.
We went ashore and walked a mile to the Butt and Oyster, Pin Mill, for dinner at an outside table. It was high tide, and Chris and Indigo watched horses that had just been exercised in the water.
On the way back we saw the Nancy Blackett, Arthur Ransome’s boat and the model for Goblin, the yacht in which the children accidentally start from Pill Mill and end up in Holland in We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea. It has been restored and is owned by a trust.
The Nancy Blackett
The previous night was the European Cup final, and we stayed on board to watch England lose on penalties.We had no England flag so used a number 8 signal pennant to stand in for it.
Will then photoshopped a picture of Indigo with our Irish courtesy flag into an Italian flag (changing orange to red) and sent it to the Italian side of her family when they won.
It was still a good dinner! We watched the match on Will’s laptop linked to my phone as a hub.
Children found the size of the container ships awe inspiring as we passed them close by at Felixstowe, but Seb and Xan were much more excited to see the polar research ship the Sir David Attenborough, which is registered at Stanley in the Falklands but whose UK home base is Harwich.
Felixstowe container portBoaty is hiding somewhere
They scrutinised every inch looking for the Boaty MacBoatface, the winner of the national naming competition for the ship. The winning name was hastily switched by the organisers to a research submarine the ship carries, after the competition misfired in a rather splendid way. Boaty must have been stored on the other side, because we couldn’t see it.
After anchoring for lunch further up the Stour we locked in and spent a night in Shotley Marina, where we explored with the boys along the river and also looked at the derelict Royal Navy training college HMS Ganges. There we saw the sadly decayed mast of a 19th century sailing warship once used for recruit training.
The mast at HMS Ganges
You can see from the photo below that half of the top yard has broken off and is hanging down from a rigging wire, the other half has gone and a complete spar is missing lower down. Before closure in 1976, the college featured annually in the newspapers for its graduation ceremony, where cadets perched along the yardarms and the best in class saluted while standing precariously on the 18 inch diameter ‘button’ at the very top. He was called the Button Boy.
The Button Boy is at the very top
Seb and Xan brought their sketch books and relaxed with them later in the saloon.
Below. crew boss Ben, helmsman Seb and cabin boy Xan take charge.
At the end of this cruise, which also featured a walk to Pin Mill for dinner, the water taxi at Woolverstone Marina made packing up and leaving the boat on the mooring a lot easier than it used to be by dinghy. Dinghies are great, but not so much fun carrying a crew, loads of baggage and a week’s worth of rubbish ashore.
Landing in the dinghy atThe RocksBen, Peter and Xan coming back from the pubIn the water taxi, Ben talking to the drivetLeaving Spring Fever on the Woolverstone mooring
The last event of the month was me taking Spring Fever to Suffolk Yacht Harbour at Levington for a bargain summer scrub. We were trailing such huge quantities of weed that with a clean bottom we added a knot afterwards, measured at 2500 rpm on the engine.
Out for a wash
While waiting. I had a lovely 6 mile walk along the banks of the Orwell and back inland (via a pint at The Ship at Levington).
We are now pottering happily around the Essex and Suffolk coasts, visiting places we got to know well years ago when we kept our various boats here.
From our rented mooring at Woolverstone on the River Orwell, we went down to the River Colne, spending a night in the Pyefleet, one of the best known East Coast anchorages, just behind Mersea Island. We picked up a mooring buoy rather than having to spend half an hour getting glutinous mud off the anchor next day – worth the £10 we paid to the man from the oyster fishery, who came round on a paddleboard collecting money from yachts.
This is the story of the first year of our two-year round Britain cruise in Spring Fever, a retired racing boat on a mission to go slowly (like us). A previous round Britain in 2007-8 in an earlier boat, Pepper of Brixham, had left us hungry to see more of the beautiful West of Scotland, where we had time to spend only a month sailing.We decided to go anti-clockwise, up the East Coast and down the West, rather than the clockwise route we used last time, and to use the Caledonian Canal rather than Cape Wrath and the Orkneys, which we visited in 2008. The account of our passage back from Scotland down the West Coast of Ireland in 2013 was written as a daily blog (follow this link to see all the posts) but this first part of the cruise is a single account, a photo album with words.
A cheerful start – Robin off Beachy Head
We left Cowes on 11 April 2012 for what always seems a bit of a trudge to the Thames Estuary, though with the right timing there are about 11 hours of favourable tide on the way from Beachy Head to Ramsgate, which cheers things up. After leaving Brighton, for an hour or two we were much entertained by a stray Robin’s search for a safe haven on the boat. He eventually found such a good hiding place – it was a mystery where – that we didn’t see him again until he flew off while we were entering the Deben in Suffolk more than a day later. He had hitched a 130 mile ride.
Follow this link to read the the rest of the story of our cruise up the East Coast and through the Caledonian Canal.
tide by tide 