Stripped down boating.

A different approach to sailing and boating, and a bit of storytelling too…..

‘It was a dark and stormy night’…...gales all areas

I don’t know about you lot but I love a sea story that starts with the epic line ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ and in this case it really was a dark and stormy night except that I wasn’t doing something heroic off the Horn but cowering at anchor in the best shelter I could find from a series of spring gales.

It was early in the season – March if I remember it correctly, and I was trying to make an early season escape in my little centerboard cat ketch from the Plymouth rivers down to the west country where I had ambitious plans to start a voyage around the Uk over several seasons. I can tell you that it was bitterly cold in the boat because I hadn’t yet fitted the little Liberty with a charcoal ‘pansy’ stove so once I was anchored I spent most of the evening and then night under my big old sleeping bag right next to the galley stove where I made serial brews to help me keep warm.

Earlier that day I had left my mooring up near Calstock in the river Tamar and motored downriver eventually leaving the river system completely and putting out through the narrows and out over ‘The Bridge’ into Plymouth sound. It was already uncomfortably windy there but what I noted and what made my decision not to go any further was that there were swell waves breaking clean over the breakwater and I suspected that there would be a horrible wind over tide situation out in the western entrance. I messed around for a bit, trying to decide what to do and then backed off to the anchorage off the beach at Mount Edgecombe to wait out the last of a big spring ebb.

When I did get going again I had an instinct that conditions were going to get a lot worse so I just motor-sailed back through the narrows and up past the dockyard and the Torpoint ferry’s eventually turning into the Lynher river and going up past Jupiter point on the new flood. I’d thought to stop right there as it’s sometimes sheltered there but the wind had increased a lot and was coming straight down the river so I pushed on until we were under the high ground at the Dandy hole anchorage where the river turns sharply to the north.

If you’re wondering I didn’t take one of the deep water ‘holes’ as the little centerboarder didn’t need it and anyway I found better shelter in the shallow water under the western bank – that’s pretty well where I stayed for the next two days as gales boomed overhead.

….So I was sat in the boat as the light faded outside to a grey and gloomy clag, eagerly awaiting the shipping forecast via radio on BBC radio 4. The first thing that happened in relation to having to sit through truly awful radio 4 programming was that I came close to having ‘radio rage’ and nearly ‘tossed my cookie’ (radio) right out of the cot. The second thing that happened was that it was the first and only time that I have heard the shipping forecast presenter give a prognosis of “gales all areas” so not only was it a dark and stormy night where I was but it was going to be a stormy night everywhere…….from the Utsire’s (north and south) all the way down to Biscay and Trafalgar.

Iv’e never been quite sure where the Utsire’s are either but on this night I didn’t fancy being wherever they were once I heard that it wasn’t a mere gale blowing there but a good Force 10 at the least. All it meant for me was that I wasn’t going to make passage down to the west country in a rising gale on what is essentially a lee shore all the way from leaving Plymouth breakwater to running up into Fowey – where the entrance faces straight into a south westerly gale.

One of the main features of where I sail, the south west of England, is that we have a whole series of tidal rivers formed by deep wooded valleys – great for anchoring and shelter : except that to move between them always involves a coastal passage along a ‘bold’ coast which is usually a lee shore as well. Well, tonight and for the next couple of days I would make best use of one of those rivers, the Lynher, to shelter from the gale blowing overhead and if a weather window opened up then I would just run for home up the Tamar. My home river, the Tamar, is good for shelter in a westerly but less so when the wind is in the south or south-east.

Now, here’s a little thing…..at this time I was still working and one of the regular features of my work life was that colleagues would ask questions such as “what’s it like”……what’s it like in a gale for example or what is there to do on a long passage – don’t you get bored ?. Well, no and no, I on’t think I have ever been bored while at sea and not even while constrained within the limits of a small boat at anchor in a gale, there is always something to do. I tend to read a lot when I am at sea or when I am simply at anchor and I try to make as good food as I can and then if there is really nothing to do then nothing is what I do except for watching the world go past very slowly as the boat swings to wind and tide.

The main entertainment of this anchorage was when a small pram bowed dinghy came out from Wacker lake, rowed past where I was anchored and put ashore on Redshank point where it’s owner , I presume, jumped out and heaved the little craft up onto the muddy foreshore where he humped a big old military style ‘Bergen’ rucksack ashore and proceeded to make a bushcraft style wild-camp on the grassy area there.

It was already a grey dusk half-light so I didn’t see all of the details but I was fascinated because I used to do that kind of thing at one point in my life although mostly I chose woodlands, for shelter, rather than muddy tidal estuaries. Whatever though, he seemed to know his stuff ; from the light of his head torch I saw a well set Tarp, set in the same configuration I often used in bad weather – what I call a ‘flying vee’ with it’s low and sharp end set into the wind.

When, later that same night, I went topside to set my anchor lantern cum riding light for the night it was still gusty and raining hard now as well ; my last view of our man’s wild-camp on Redshank point was the glowing embers from his campfire and when I first looked out the next morning it was empty and from not having seen the little craft come past me I assumed that he had continued upriver.

Discussion.

I have been asked several times what I thought the little dinghy was, I initially took it for a conventional small pram bowed dinghy – possibly a larger boat’s tender. In retrospect though I now think that it might have been a Mirror class dinghy as it was about the right size and carried a stumpy mast as well as being rowed : I never saw the boat being sailed but it certainly looked possible. Later on, when I asked around, nobody that I knew seemed to know who the mystery boater was ; I would have loved to catch up with him and find out what kind of things he did with that little dinghy.

At the time I only vaguely knew about dinghy cruising from having watched a couple of Dylan Winter’s video’s featuring a larger Wayfarer dinghy and of course from having read about the exploits of Frank and Margaret Dye in their, similar, boat. If anything it put me more in the mind of canoeing because canoeists will often stop during a passage or expedition and make camp ashore ; in fact we, my partner and I, had often done that during our own canoeing trips.

Of course, this is now all just so much personal history as everything about my life has either changed or is now changing , and mostly i feel for the worse. Given that the time I am writing about – roughly around 2017 or the second year that I had that little boat was seemingly a positive time for me and crucially a time when I still had positive ideas and ambitions it seems equally strange to find myself in a state of mind which is anything but positive. I was talking to my partner about this just recently and I think that something that she realizes is that soon after this event I was to have possibly my best time ever with a boat after which it feels more like a peak was reached and since which time it’s all been downhill.

Just to put this in context, in 2019 I left my last job in the NHS and immediately following my last day at work I threw my kit and some food aboard the selfsame boat and headed off down my local river and within a couple of days was leaving the south west coast of England for western Brittany where, once I recovered a bit, spent 110 days living aboard while I cruised down to southern Brittany and back. As I said earlier….after that it all went horribly wrong and I am extremely glad to have had what I think of now as my best year in sailing.

To bring the blog element right up to date it is now at least 7 years since that time on the water, the little Liberty has gone and with the events of the last few years I came to the realization and decision that to have another boat I would most likely have to either build one or do a significant conversion on something that might work…..except that I was still thinking in terms of a small cruising boat. Well, the boat that I eventually did build is now sitting under a cover under it’s build shelter and any moment now I’ll walk past it to go and open up the workshop and pull out the tools that I need for today’s work – not on the boat because though because iv’e now started on the yearly routine of giving the garden about a month of hard effort.

Regular followers of my blog will know that I launched the boat with the intention of doing a few days of sea trials except what actually happened was more like a survival exercise culminating with a nasty fall into a muddy dock and then getting the boat home to start sorting out some of the problems. What I should be doing is working towards a second launch and sailing trials but I seem to have completely run out of energy and enthusiasm for the boat so i’m getting on with essential seasonal jobs instead.

Now, there’s a whole list of jobs to be done(on the boat) written up inside the shed door and I spent a couple of weeks tackling some of them but then simply running out of enthusiasm. In the last 2 weeks I have had to seriously consider that it might be the end of the road for me in terms of boats and sailing and I even considered offering the boat for sale….except that it isn’t quite finished to sailing standard but it’s safe in the drive, under shelter and unless I deliberately spend money on parts and materials it doesn’t have to cost anything to stay there. Right now i’m taking a total break from the project and I am increasingly uncertain as to whether I will continue with it this year. Perhaps even more tellingly I have mostly stopped blogging entirely and even left all of the social media based sailing sites that I used to be member of and contribute posts towards : if anything I mainly feel a kind of antipathy towards what I see as a mostly passive and sponge-like social media audience so I have simply disengaged and logged off.

My own thoughts about this are about whether I have simply accepted that my time in boats and sailing is over, secondly whether I have also just given up and thirdly whether I have only been making worse and worse decisions since the time of my little sea story above. It might be that my first time back on the water was just a bruising trip and that all I need to do is some better work and better preparation and get back ‘in the saddle’ before I lose the last vestiges of enthusiasm and whatever sea-going resilience I once had. Another part of my mind is doing intense psychological withdrawl and basically saying …..fuck it iv’e had enough. In all truth and seriousness I have done a lot of sailing and maybe it is just time to draw a line under it and do something else.

I’m sorry to say that it gets a lot worse than that, at least in my mind ; last year for example I was saying to a close friend that I describe the whole feel of this strange age that we live in as ‘the party is over’ and anything like boats and sailing is a kind of frivolity that we can ill afford. I happen to think that we are teetering on the edge of disaster (as a society) but to explain that would need an entire ‘random’ post and TBH nobody reads them so it would be just so much work for me and basically just ‘pissing in the wind’ as we sailors say.

Another train of thought, don’t worry, it’s the last one for today, is that perhaps i’m in a mental place that is better described as a ‘last chance saloon’ in terms of going about on the water and that maybe the future I should be looking at would be much less like a small and relatively complex cruising boat and more like the dinghy I saw that night while at anchor in hard conditions.

This kind of thing has been an occasional feature of my blog in that iv’e often been talking about low budget boating and sometimes approached, but never dealt with in an organized way is the absolute bottom end where the budget is essentially zero or at least close to it. If anything this is the opposite approach to my own current project which although not a large one is an expensive one and in fact it has taken everything I have for the last 3 years. In practice what that means is buying high quality materials while not spending anything on anything that isn’t the project…..you should see (perhaps not) the state of my everyday clothes !

Lessons learned.

I guess that you all want to hear about the boat proposal because that’s the interesting part right ?. Well i’m sorry but you’re going to have to sit and read through me talking about the mission profile, task, or purpose first. The other part of this section of this non-post though I something that my blogger/boatbuilder friend Steve Parke encouraged me to think about after my bruising trip with the Pathfinder, and, by the way, to think about what I had gained and learned rather than beating myself up even more than I was doing already.

The first lesson that I think I learned from the trip was that while my choice of craft might have been a mistake my decision to actually build a boat was a good one because that one decision has given me an enormously engaging 2 years of work, from which I learnt a lot. As to whether I would, or would want to, build a second craft of some kind I am much less sure because there are other things that I would like to do that involve making things but necessarily boat-y things. The second and perhaps main thing that I learned about my testing voyage was that maybe, even strongly possibly likely, is that my physical capacity for discomfort isn’t what it once was although I did, strangely enough, enjoy the hard physical aspect of rowing the boat – even when I wasn’t making much ground.

So…..onto the mission parameters. Having said earlier that I might be at the life-stage of saying ” farewell and thanks for all the fish” that might just be one more mistake at a time when I would really benefit from the kind of hard physical workout that my fail trip afforded me except that it might also include the bushcraft element of making camp ashore when that becomes a more favorable option . Thinking that way might for example take away the need for a dry living space aboard the boat – something I urgently have to work on to turn the Pathfinder into it’s intended role as an expedition style boat.

The second main parameter is that whatever craft I come up with has to capable of being moved manually with say just a launching trolley rather than a full-on road trailer plus car to handle it on and off a limited number of available slips. The ideal, for example, would be to have whatever craft I come up with semi permanently based in a dinghy boat park or somewhere like the boat compound used by the Gig club down at Cotehele quay : on any normal day I could just walk down there with my kit in a rucksack as long as I kept permanent kit on board.

There are 3 or 3 main choices of craft that could be used in that manner – the open canoe for example as in the past I have been a canoeist and sea kayaker. Another choice, little seen in the UK is a sail assisted rowing expedition boat such as the fairly recent ‘Angus’ rowing/sailing boat. It’s important to say that while I should be able to acquire a sea going canoe or modifiable kayak on the secondhand market I would almost certainly have to build the Angus design.

The third option is to find a retired racing dinghy and de-tune/convert such a boat into an everyday sail and oar kind of watercraft – with that in mind iv’e been having a look around and also basing the idea on a mystery boat that I saw on the creek side in Blakeney (Norfolk) UK.

Oh, while we’re here I may as well mention option 4 which is also a build but is a much smaller and simpler one in the form of a general purpose tender/dinghy but to a design that has high stability and could be rowed, sailed or take a small motor.

Holy scow !

For those who have taken an interest in the minimal budget boat before here’s a quick look at the main idea that iv’e been playing around with and it centers around an old high performance dinghy from the 1970’s called the Fireball.

For those that don’t know the boat it is (or was) a one-design racing dinghy originally designed in 1962 by Peter Milne and according to it’s Wikipedia page over 125.000 of them have been built – originally intended for amateur construction in simple chine plywood the boat has also been built professionally in GRP. To the modern eye it was always quite an odd looking boat as it’s basically a Scow form with a squared off bow and transom…..I have heard them described as a fast floating tea-tray. Right now the one I have my eye on is way down at the end of west Cornwall….any further west and it would be out in the southern Irish sea !

I expect that some readers will now be experiencing a fair amount of bafflement and also asking the question of how would I deal with a relatively frisky and high performance boat given that I just failed with a much more capable one. My first answer is mostly that the mission is very different from the one I have set out for the Pathfinder….this one wouldn’t for example ever be an expedition boat, merely one that I use to go out locally in the rivers to the north of Plymouth. Second answer is that the Fireball hull is only the starting point for a craft which would be better thought of as somewhere between a canoe and a traditional sailing duck punt ; lets take a wander over to Norfolk and take a look at the actual boat that has inspired all of this venture.

So, the actual boat that this idea is based on isn’t the little pram dinghy I saw that night….although well done to it’s driver I say…..this idea is more based on this unusual looking craft which is sitting in the saltings alongside the creek at Blakeney. I don’t know exactly what it is except that it’s scow shape with a lug rig, a low coaming around the cockpit and only about 12 to 14 feet……and bright red as well !. The name ‘duck punt’ came to mind but it’s nothing like the ‘punters’ use which is more like a very slim dory. An actual sailing and rowing dory would be a good fit for this project too and although it would require a build they are simple boats to build and only need cheap materials beyond the hull panels. After that the main idea is ruthless and radical low cost simplicity which needs the absolute minimum of ‘tech’ fittings. After and before that though it’s mostly about ‘the mission’.

To explain the mission more completely I like to imagine the situation in ten years time say when another enterprising younger boater has found himself a small cruising boat that works in the same way as my little Liberty did for me. Our new boater also chances upon the Griffiths-esque practice of being at least a 3 season boater and is one day (night) sheltering at anchor when some weird old guy comes rowing past in an odd looking dinghy and makes a stealth camp somewhere on the foreshore . By then he probably won’t be allowed to have something simple like a campfire because quite soon I am sure such things will be banned by the state.

The dinghy has probably been stored somewhere close to water access, in my case even possibly in the corner of a National Trust property……although, having said that, they are likely to ban anything enterprising. It’s ‘driver’ (that’ll) be me then, will most likely have bussed and hiked down to the boat because by then cars will have been outlawed and our man will have procured a licence or permission of some kind to actually go out on the water…..how are our freedoms lost…..and will have sailed and rowed enough to get away from 99% of other people, at least for a while. Just to add that there won’t be an outboard motor either because they will have been banned long before. At some that little dinghy, his property, will be seized and destroyed by the same state that will soon have sized his house and made him homeless.

Depressed……? what me ?. No mate just looking to windward and sniffing what’s on the air (smells like BS to me)

Post-y scripty thing.

As is fairly typical for me I walked past the little red lugger every night for a week when we were either heading to or from the Blakeney pub which became our local that week (the food is good !). When we got home though I didn’t seem to have any photographs of it so that was merely my excuse to drive back again (only 380 miles) and this time take some photographs on 2 cameras so that I would come back with at least some record.

In a big way this entire post is a lot about the north Norfolk coast because iv’e now been there half a dozen times but still not sailed, canoed or kayaked there……for that matter we have never been out one of the tourist boats that take punters out to see the seals off Blakeney harbor : no need to really because this time a young seal pup visited us when we were walking along the ‘run’ out of Wells harbor channel out towards the bar.

During our last trip we did a walk one day, out from Burnham Overy Staithe out towards Deepdale because i’d picked out a foot path that seemed to traverse the salt marsh out towards the dunes : it didn’t and instead quickly petered out our side of a muddy creek. There, like many places on that coast there seemed to be a maze of small creeks that would be perfect to explore and wild camp (and, I suspect, break some rules ) in a sailing canoe, open canoe or rowing dory, and many places to go and stealth camp where the masses of tourists can’t get to.

On our next to last night in Blakeney this time it must have been the sailing club’s regular race night and there were several solo and crewed boats out working their way out over the tide and even the smalller solo boats…..I couldn’t tell you their class……looked to be perfect to be handled, launched and recovered by a single ‘old git’ (me then) and carry a rucksack and food barrel just like an open canoe. So…..maybe i’m in the market for an end of season solo sailing dinghy….and maybe i’m not !.