Attending to the tender
On the 14th June I reckoned we were in sailing condition. Julian, Catherine and I spent a frantic morning buying last minute bits and pieces, and stuffing everything that was still lying around the yard into the cabin. I had a bike and a workbench that wouldn’t fit, so they were shoved into the 17 foot Canadian canoe that I was taking as a dinghy and we towed them behind us. We had one minor disaster that morning when Julian borrowed a pair of bolt croppers to cut the excess wire off the shrouds, the eyes at the bottom of which were made up temporarily with wire grips – I planned to take them off one by one later and splice the wires properly. Unfortunately when trimming the port lower shroud he accidentally cut through the shroud itself rather than the spare wire! We simply used more wire grips to hold the cut bit together, and it stayed good until I could replace the shroud when the mast came out the following winter.
I settled my account at the boatyard and we slipped our lines, bound for Tollesbury, a muddy creek at the mouth of the Blackwater Estuary. We drifted slowly past the Thames barges lying at the town quay and picked up enough steerage way as the river widened to avoid all the boats lying on their swinging moorings downstream. Then round to the north of Northey island, and south again past Osea. As the estuary widened the wind gradually picked up, and we discovered that the canoe was not well behaved when towed downwind. It had an unpleasant habit of blowing round and trying to overtake us going sideways, at which point it would heel alarmingly and come close to capsizing. As we swung round the Nass beacon and started tacking back into the narrow muddy channel towards Tollesbury it behaved itself better.
Having left Maldon on the top of the tide, it was now getting on towards low water – and the channel to Tollesbury is rather shallow. It was probably a little silly to try to get in at that state of tide, but I tried anyway, with the natural result that we ran onto the mud tacking just a fraction too late in the narrow channel. We stuck good and fast, and the falling tide soon made it pointless to try and get her off. So we sat and waited until it came back again. At least Catherine and I sat around – Julian jumped off for a swim. When the tide did come up the wind had died, and we rowed the last few hundred yards up the creek to the mooring buoys.
The maiden sail had shown up a few jobs that needed doing before tackling the North Sea. Not least was converting the canoe so that it could somehow be stowed on deck, as at 17 feet it was never going to fit in one piece on a 21 feet boat. I also wanted a bit more ballast – now there was no engine in her Teals bum was sticking up a bit too much in the air for my liking. The other major job was to build a pin rail to tie off all the halyards and other lines at the mast – oddly, there was nothing there at all! We had got by on the way down from Maldon by tying everything off on the two halyard winches, but the resulting tangle wasn’t something I would want to tackle on a heaving deck at midnight.
The ballast turned out to be easy. Andy, who works for an outdoor centre based on the old lightship moored in Tollesbury, recalled that they had an old sawbench that they no longer needed and had dismantled. The massive cast iron sections were plenty heavy enough. One of them had the date of manufacture stamped on it. The bench had been built in the 19th century, so it was certainly appropiate ballast for a 90-year-old boat.
The pin rail I constructed from some pieces of iroko that Andy had lying around his lightship, with long stainless steel threaded rod going down through the deck to take the tension of all the ropes that would be attached to them. Andy even had some spare old plastic belaying pins that I could use until I got round to turning some nice wooden ones.
Modifying the canoe was the final job. There was no way a 17 foot canoe was going to fit comfortably on the deck of a 21 foot boat, and given the way she had behaved on the way down from Maldon it would have been foolhardy to expect her to still be at the end of her painter if we tried to tow her across the North Sea. So one day Julian and I paddled ashore in her. We got hold of some plywood, and with the aid of cardboard templates made two pairs of bulkheads that were held together with a number stainless steel bolts, with washers between each pair of bulkheads to hold them a few millimetres apart. We screwed the bulkheads into place, took a deep breath – and chopped the canoe into three pieces, sawing down the narrow gap between the bulkheads where they were held apart by the washers. When the bulkheads were unbolted and the washers taken out, they could be bolted back together nice and tightly; hopefully, tight enough to be watertight. It was quite important that this little plan worked, as the canoe was our only means of getting out again to Teal that evening, anchored out in the channel. Luckily, it did. We had made the three sections slightly different lengths, so the two ends of the canoe could be stowed in the middle section and the whole caboodle lashed down on the cabin top. There it soon became a repository for all the spare sails, ropes, fenders and anything else that was lying around. It was a remarkably useful thing to have.
We were performing the surgery on the canoe on the waterfront at Tollesbury, next to an unusual ferrocement boat. As my trusty handsaw sliced through the plastic skin of the canoe a car drew up. Or rather lurched up, for it seemed to be having some problems with its clutch. It couldn’t quite make it to the parking spot on the verge, so Julian and I helped the owner push it along. This was our introduction to Mick the Brick. I knew of Mick by reputation. Mick had spent most of his working life building concrete yachts, all sturdy and strong and, perhaps surprisingly for such a construction method, rather shapely. At one time he had quite a successful business building them, but the market for concrete yachts was never enormous, and has declined a good bit in recent years. I don’t think anyone does it professionally now, although you still very occasionally see the odd chicken-wire hull going up in obscure old boatyards as some dreaming amateur starts building. Not many of them get as far as the plastering stage.
Mick was retired now, though keeping as busy as ever working on his own boat, Estelle. There aren't many men left in the world like Mick. He cared not a fig for what anyone thought of him, and he wasn’t at all shy of telling other people what he thought of them. But as he stopped and watched us carry on chopping our canoe up, he didn’t look at us warily and suggest we take a turn down to the nearest loony bin, as any reasonable person would have done. He seemed to think it quite normal that people should be sitting on his doorstep chopping up their dinghy. He invited us along for a cup of tea when we had finished, which we were glad to accept.
The interior of Estelle was beautifully if simply finished in wood, with a little solid fuel stove that Mick had built himself from an old gas bottle. In fact virtually everything in the boat was home-built, and I had already seen her spars lying ashore, made from old telegraph poles.
Much of the cabin was lined with bookshelves, with many old books. We sat and chatted for a while. It was refreshing to find someone with a boat as simple as mine, for Estelle had as few gadgets as Teal.
“Is there anything you need?” asked Mick generously “I’ve got a spare log if you want one”. I did have Juanitas log on loan of course, but it would be nice if Teal had her own.
The following day my cousin was getting married. I had originally thought I would be far abroad by this time, but seeing as I was still in the country it would be great to go up and join in, and see my family.
So early in the morning I cycled off towards the nearest train station (a good few miles away), and took the train to Cheshire, where the wedding was taking place. It was good to get away and have a day where I barely thought about the boat. If the truth be told, I was pretty burnt out by this point. The last two months I had worked almost non-stop getting the boat ready. The pace had increased towards the end, and it had become rather stressful. I knew that the work I was doing in the refit was working at the limit of my capabilities, and I was unsure about the North Sea crossing. For all I liked the look of Teal, she was virtually untried, a tiny boat facing a big sea not famed for it’s kindly weather, and busy with shipping. It was a far greater challenge than I had ever taken on, and I wasn’t certain I was up to it. I was enormously grateful that Julian was prepared to risk coming with me, but having another soul on board also added to my responsibilities if things did go wrong. To be blunt, I was scared. But I couldn’t back out now. In less than a week Catherine would be flying out to Denmark to meet us there, and a fortnight after that two other friends, Anne and Holly, had also flights booked to Sweden to come and join me.
We heard a forecast the evening before I left for the wedding. The next few days looked good, but at the end the forecaster made a throw-away comment about a big depression moving in after that. On the way back to the boat the morning after the wedding I stopped at Estelle to pick up the log and a long warp Mick had also promised us. Mick glanced at the sky and shook his head. “I wouldn’t go now if I were you” he said. “I reckon there is some bad weather coming”. But the three-day forecast we heard on the radio before we slipped from the buoy mentioned nothing, and I wanted to get the crossing over with. I dumped my bike and some other unwanted gear on Lightship Andy to look after while I was away, and Julian paddled ashore in the canoe to collect me from the sea wall.
Julian had stayed on board while I was away, and had finished the last few remaining jobs and stowed all the kit. Soon after I climbed on board we had the canoe up on deck, split and stowed on the cabin top, and we had slipped from our mooring buoy.