A SAIL UPRIVER

My first sail of the new season was, as tradition demands, on April 1st, the day I launched 'Poppy'. She was glad to escape from the gravel patch in front of my house. This first sail was an uneventful spin barring the inevitable (for me) wrinkles which needed to be unwrinkled.

My second sail was last night. I planned to take one of my sons in law for a quiet float up river to the Turf Hotel, there to drink a beer, as in my beautiful verses, and so to drift happy home. I 'phoned the Turf to make sure they were open and was told, from the mouth of the landlord himself, that they would be serving beer until ten, no food though!

We set off with a lively breeze blowing on our nose. With some difficulty we inched up towards Turf as best we could but our thirst made us impatient with sail so we took to the oars and rowed turn and turn about to the Turf against the wind.

It was an unsatisfactory landing. The moment we landed, the breeze which would have taken us trimly home died the death. Moreover the landing stage had disappeared and the path was littered with engineering plant over which I nearly broke my ancient neck. The promontory was deserted. The pub had closed. This was at half past eight!

We rowed home as sober as Mormons and by now the tide had started to ebb so we had an easy enough time of it. We made 'Poppy' fast to her mooring and paddled to Lympstone's Green.

As we went ashore lights flashed and a voice from the dark informed us that the coastguard had been called out to search for us. Why? you might well ask. Because an imaginative neighbour had thought we MIGHT have got into trouble. Why should he have thought that? Because it WAS DARK. I shall not describe the ensuing nonsense of having to dismiss zealous inshore lifeboatmen and coastguards.

You might think that, what with contrary winds, equivocating landlords, over imaginative neighbours and lack of beer, this expedition is to be classed as a failure but that would be to take too narrow a view . It was a wonderful spring tide. Our outward voyage was under one of those glorious Exe sunsets, not of the obvious blood dripping kind but of the subtler golden kind. For a while, for some reason unknown, the sky above us was full of swirling arabesques of shrieking gulls. Then the curlew flew South high overhead and a lone heron flapped from Topsham to Powderham. Our return was under the most brilliant starlight. We sailed beneath Charles's Wain, surely the loveliest name of the many for that constellation, and Orion stood to his post nobly in the West. Apart from the rumble of traffic over the motorway bridge at Topsham the Estuary was silent. Such evenings are rare and to be treasured.

OF MANY DROWNINGS

On October 14th 1922, eight days after the drowning of Captain Garnsworthy and Pilot Pym, (See this blog for 28th April 2010) this column appeared in the Exmouth Journal under the title, “TRAGIC COINCIDENCE”:

“The hand of coincidence has been very much in evidence in connection with the disappearance of the sailing boat Primrose last week. It has been already stated that Capt. Garnsworthy’s grandfather, father, brother and one son had previously met their deaths by drowning. The chain of circumstance in connection with Mr Samuel Pym, the Exmouth pilot who accompanied Capt. Garnsworthy in the Primrose is equally remarkable. In 1896 two Exmouth pilots, William Pym and George Carnell, were drowned when going to the assistance of a vessel in distress on the bar.

George Carnell was succeeded by his son, Charles Carnell. The latter was drowned off Teignmouth in 1909 when out with a pleasure party of seven passengers. His place as an Exmouth pilot was taken by Samuel Pym who now appears to have met a similar fate. The William Pym who was involved in the 1896 disaster was not a member of the same family as Samuel Pym.

Although a keen look-out has been maintained, it is not anticipated that any discovery will be made until the bodies rise to the surface, usually on the ninth day. Local fishermen will therefore go out in considerable numbers to-day and cruise around in the neighbourhood of the Wreck buoy in the hope of recovering the bodies from the sea. It is not a pleasant task but there is not a boatman who would not go to any trouble in order to snatch from the sea its dead. It is a curious fact that most seafarers dread the thought of drowning less than the possibility of their bodies remaining undiscovered.”

But the sea did not readily give up the dead that were in it. The body of Samuel Pym was not found until it was washed up on Oddicombe beach on October 22nd. I don’t know where or when Captain Garnsworthy reappeared.

CAPSIZE

Squire Headlong, in Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall, had a pleasure boat, “which he steered with amazing dexterity; but as he always indulged himself in the utmost possible latitude of sail, he was occasionally upset by a sudden gust, and was indebted to his skill in the art of swimming for the opportunity of tempering with a copious libation of wine the unnatural frigidity introduced into his stomach by the extraordinary intrusion of water, an element which he had religiously determined should never pass his lips..”

Nowadays there is a whole lot of capsizing going on in the Estuary, where the salt water calls all the louder for a copious libation after the event, but the dinghies mostly seem to bob up again like so many kellymen and the wetsuited, drysuited crews of today are wonderfully independent and seem to be as happy in the water as they are out of it.

All new boats liable to capsize are now declared capsizable and are lumbered with an alarming mark depicting a surreal boat lying diametrically upside down beneath the water, her keel pointing to heaven and her sail still fluttering beneath the wave. This labelling is there no doubt to comply with contemporary regulations and my Poppy came to me so blemished but I have presumed to unscrew the ugly brown plastic label that would also dictate how many people might sail in her, to wit: four, and how much baggage a lone sailor may take with him, viz. 300 kilograms, and square it away. As yet she has not capsized.

If she has not yet capsized it is because, unlike Squire Headlong, I seldom indulge myself in the utmost possible latitude of sail. Now and again, when running, the wind veers behind her and with the ensuing jibe the lug bangs like a cannon and the boat suffers an extraordinary intrusion of water over the rails but no worse than that.

If she were to capsize I have to admit I don’t know whether I could right her. In a sailing dinghy the leverage of the centreboard is all important to the capsize drill and my Poppy has no centreboard. Moreover the manuals assume two people will right a boat and the lone sailor would seem to be at a disadvantage. One day perhaps I shall need to find out if it is possible for one man to set a Scaffie right way up again once she has blown over, meanwhile I trust to reefing and solicitude and need no excuse for copious libations of wine.

THE LIEUTENANT AND THE SERVANT BOY

It was a Friday, the 29th day of March 1816 and young Walter Folliott was at home on leave. He, at the tender age of nineteen, was already a Lieutenant of Royal Marines who had seen active service aboard His Majesty’s ships. His family had worried about him during his long absence from home and imagined him facing the dangers of war but he had triumphed and had returned home to them safe and sound and they had rejoiced to welcome him. He was a personable young man who, as his death notices in the papers put it, ‘had endeared himself by the most amiable and conciliating manners.’ No doubt he had a conciliating relationship with the servant boy whom he took sailing with him in his pleasure boat.

Walter’s father was Captain Daniel Folliott of the Royal Navy who had served with Admiral Byng off Minorca and who lived at Topsham. He had been born Daniel Follett but later changed his name. Walter's pleasure boat would have put out from the riverside near the Follett house, Follett Lodge, close by the Passage Inn and famous as the birthplace of William Webb Follett. On that blustery March day Walter went sailing on the Estuary and took with him the servant boy who died with him. The servant boy’s death went unnoticed except in so far as he was there, with his master, in a small boat.

When they were sailing past Powderham, the boat was suddenly upset by a gust of wind. They were in the deep waters of the channel. The capsize was seen and within minutes other boats came to the spot but both Walter and the servant boy had disappeared. They had drowned. Of Walter, it was written in the papers of the time that, by his family as well as to a large circle of friends, ‘his loss will be long and severely deplored.’

There is a memorial to young Walter on the walls of Topsham church. The servant boy, of course, gets no mention.

THE LOSS OF THE PRIMROSE

On Friday 6th October 1922 a friendly sailing match took place from Exmouth. The match was between four small sailing dinghies, sixteen to eighteen feet in length. These were the beautiful, classic, gentlemen’s pleasure boats of the period. There were two new Topsham boats, Lorna and Joanna Taylor and two older Exmouth boats, Dona and Primrose. (Strange to tell I came to own this same Lorna in 1969 but that’s another story.) The day was forbidding, squally and rainy, and the course was ambitious. They were to sail from the Docks at Exmouth, pass inside the Fairway Buoy and then to round the Galicia Wreck Buoy off those famous stacks, the Parson and the Clerk, and so return to Exmouth.

William Pym, a pilot, turned up to sail with Mr Lewin in his boat Joanna Taylor, as often he had done before. Captain Thomas Garnsworthy’s boat, Primrose, was an open boat. The others were all halfdeckers. The breeze was so puffy that Captain Garnsworthy was advised not to compete. He, however, said he would put to sea if he, in Primrose, could have William Pym at his side. Mr Lewin lent William Pym to Captain Garnsworthy much as a man might lend a paddle to a friend. Then there was some talk as to whether or not a motor boat should accompany the dinghies but in the event they set off without.

The race started at lunchtime and lasted until teatime. Captain Holman’s boat, Lorna, was the first to finish, then Joanna Taylor, then Dona. The three skippers waited long for Primrose but she did not come home. Bert Hawkins, a fisherman, told later how he had seen four sails. Then there had been a squall. Then he saw only three.

Captain Garnsworthy was no spring chicken. He had been born at Starcross sixty five years before and had retired to become a popular citizen of Exeter and a member of the City Council. William Pym was forty two. He had been a Chief Petty Officer during the Great War and had gained the D.C.M. for services rendered in the Persian Gulf.

Both men were drowned.

The loss of the Primrose was reported in the Exmouth Journal of 7th October 1922

FIRST SAIL

Last week, overlate, I put my boat on her mooring and the next day had my first sail of the year. It was a weekday morning and I had the Estuary to myself. The sky was blue and there was just enough breeze wafting down river from Dartmoor to promise that my Poppy would ghost across the waters. I cast off and immediately began to feel the exquisite charm of controlling her movements by a light, yet firm, touch upon the tiller.

I have stolen this last sentence from that gem of a book by G Christopher Davies, 1849 – 1922, first published in Queen Victoria’s reign and entitled Boat-sailing for Amateurs, containing Particulars of the most suitable Craft, with Instructions for their proper Handling. His writing is redolent of his times:

“Crack! The sail has gybed, but it took you unawares, knocked your hat off into the water, and made you drop your pipe. Serve you right.”

I experienced no gybe, a word much closer to the original obsolete Dutch gipjen, to shift, than the usual form. In any case I have no boom to take me unawares, another lovely old Dutch word, nor did I have a pipe to drop from its jaunty angle between my lips and sadly my hat was not the boater with the college ribbon that Mr Davies would have sported. My time too was limited. A yachtsman’s time before the Great War for Civilization always seems so expansive. I had promises to keep and had only an hour or two to glide slowly across from Lympstone to Powderham and to make a triangle home from Powderham to Lympstone by way of a buoy called Number Thirty Three. But this was enough to reassure me that the Estuary was still there, sparkling and waiting.

D DAY AND THE ESTUARY

In 1941, Percy Bradford, who was a Trinity House pilot joined the Exmouth Police War Reserve. One of his wartime duties was to organise moorings for the many barges that, in 1944, came to be based in the Estuary in preparation for the D Day landings. These were strung out like a giant’s footprints between Exmouth Bight and Powderham Castle. The United States Navy and G.I.s of the Ivy Division were ashore in Exmouth. General Eisenhower came to visit and to encourage. There was fun to be had in the mild spring weather of 1944 but every man and maid knew that the happy days were numbered.

On the fifth day of June, the day before D Day, Percy was ordered to report to H.M.S. Tennyson. Tennyson was one of His Majesty’s ships ashore. It was the Imperial Hotel in Exmouth by another name. Percy was given sealed orders to take out to the anchored tugs and their barges now ready and waiting beyond Exmouth Bar. He went out in the pilot vessel and delivered the orders to the senior master. The master read his orders and signalled to the other tugs. Within two minutes every vessel was sounding its whistle. Then, in choppy seas, the little fleet moved away, bound for Normandy and the beaches.

For more on World War Two and the Estuary see the articles by Ian Dowell for Key News.

AN EDWARDIAN BOATING PARTY

From the Exmouth Journal, July 1908.

“…A party of Exonians who were on a visit to Exmouth, last Saturday, had a novel, if not disagreeable, experience of “navigating” on their own account. They hired a boat, just as others did, and went out for a short trip on the “briny.” But shortly afterwards, when somewhere between the Exmouth beach and the Warren, they found their own united strength more feeble than that of Old Neptune, and eventually were cast upon a sandbank! The boat by this time was also accommodating the water and of help their (sic) was none to be had.

Two of the passengers sacrificed comfort for the sake of their companions by jumping out, and , up to their waists in water, they succeeded in safely towing the craft away, a landing then being effected. They, however, suffered the disadvantages of wet nether garments, which, rumour says, they dried in the sun, and patiently awaited the consummation of renewed comfort…”

What I like about this story is its pomposity, its intrinsic silliness, its total insignificance and its studied unfunniness. It seems such a strange survival, such a serendipitous find. Thanks to the Exmouth journalist and against all the odds after a hundred and two years we know all we need to know about what happened to some visitors from Exeter on that Saturday in July.

They hired a boat,went aground on a sandbank and two of them had to dry out their trousers. Good, isn’t it!?

JOHN THE FERRYMAN

John Carder was an Exmouth ferryman. As ‘John the Ferryman’ he became something of a local character, loved and remembered by visitors. Shortly before he died he was portrayed, standing in his little rowing boat, in a wonderful Murduck postcard. He had a bushy white beard and he mostly wore his famous, very jolly, bowler hat. He rowed passengers to and from the Outer Warren. In 1913 he fell into Exmouth dock after a happy night on the cider and drowned. The morning light showed only his bowler hat floating over his watery grave.

In the days when Exmouth welcomed careful drovers, there was a beast market where now is Market Street. Exmouth men would get up early and walk out sometimes as far as Exeter to drive sheep and cattle and other beasts back to market. For centuries, however, some of the beasts also came across the Estuary from Dawlish carried by ferry from the Outer Warren to the Point.

John Carder had started work as a ferry crewman in 1861. Up until his death he was still ferrying. He was rowing holidaymakers and the numerous Warren bungalowdwellers back and forth across the race. But in his early years he had worked on a ferry that must have been a sizeable vessel. In the Exmouth Journal of August 29th 1908, he is reported as telling how on market days in Exmouth the ferryboat would regularly carry over sheep and horses from Dawlish and would bring even carriages across. There must once have been a considerable traffic between Dawlish and Exmouth with sheep being herded and horses being ridden and carriages being driven over the sandy dunes and levels.

CAPTAIN PEACOCK'S SWAN

The Illustrated London News of October 13, 1860 described her as ‘an elegant yacht , the very similitude of a gigantic white swan which may now often be seen sunning its wings on the shining waters of the estuary of the river whence it derives its appellation.’

Captain Peacock’s ‘Swan of the Exe’was the strangest vessel that ever sailed these waters. This fantastic 'pleasure yacht' was designed by Captain Peacock of Starcross and built by Dixons of Exmouth. She was launched in September 1860 and every inch of her lived up to her glorious name.

See now where the famous inventor, Captain Peacock, peruses Bewick’s ‘History of British Birds’ and takes the measurements of the mute swan that he finds there and scales them up fourfold.

This gives Captain Peacock a yacht only seventeen feet six inches in length but so broad in the beam that he has room for a table in the saloon large enough for ten persons to dine in comfort. While his guests sit at table they can dangle fishing lines through small oval apertures in the table which open to the water beneath. When a fish is caught it can instantly be cooked in a ‘multum in parvo cooking apparatus’. The smoke from this stove is drawn up the neck of the swan and is breathed out through the swan’s nostrils.

Imagine! It is a sunny afternoon on the Estuary. Captain Peacock’s ‘Swan’ is bearing down on us. Her vicious head rides sixteen feet above the dancing wavelets. Her wicked, beady, black eyes are looking straight at us. She is now so near that we can read, worked in letters of gold upon a silken azure banner, pendent from a brass rod which the bird carries in her bill, the proud name: ‘Swan of the Exe.’ Someone at the dinner table must have got lucky for as the great bird looms towards us she is breathing smoke.

Quick! Out of the way before the bugger pecks us!

A SALT WATER BALLAD

With last night’s tide came three ghost boats,
three spectral skippers’ grinning skulls.
They hailed the night with grisly jokes
and raised a laugh among the gulls.

The first boat was The Good Intent
who broke her back off Portland Bill.
Her skipper laughed a bitter laugh:
“The Good Intent, her's ended ill.”

The second was The Pride of Exe,
she who was wrecked this side of Beer.
Her skipper waved his bony hand:
“See how we’m humbled now, my dear.”

The third boat was The Safe Return,
she who was lost in Exmouth Bay,
“That were her name.” her skipper grinned
and that was all he had to say.

THE LOSS OF THE SARAH ANN FANNY

She was a big boat and had been an Exmouth boat and was named The Saucy Sam until, a Topsham man, Joseph Newman, bought her. He changed her name to Sarah Ann Fanny and she brought him no luck. In the season of the year 1925 she brought home all too few herring but Joseph Newman pinned his hopes on the new season. On Friday 15th January 1926 a fleet of motor drifters set out in the afternoon and came home at night. The Sarah Ann Fanny sailed with them. The catch was disappointing. The fleet brought home only a few hundred herring between them.

The next day, the Saturday, the weather was unsettled and most of the skippers chose not to venture out to sea. Five boats, however, set out in squally weather and one of these was the Sarah Ann Fanny, her owner desperate to make a good catch. In the late afternoon they found good sized shoals and each of the boats netted some ten thousand herring before making for home. Four of the boats came home before midnight but the Sarah Ann Fanny stayed longer in the fishing grounds and all the time the tide was turning against her. By the time she reached the channel the night was as black as pitch and the ebb was running against her bows. Just opposite Conger Rocks she struck the channel side of the Pole Sand. The tide was falling rapidly now and the breeze was freshening. There were four of them on board, Joseph Newman, George Pym, Jim Bowers and Isaac Perry, all experienced fishermen. For a desperate half hour they tried to move the Sarah Ann Fanny off the bank but there was nothing they could do to float their boat. Cold and wet they saved themselves by climbing into their dinghy and rowing through the choppy waters to land near the Coastguard station. Then they rowed hard against the tide as far as the dock in search of help. Four men were prepared to risk their lives in a bid to save the drifter, George and Abe Edworthy of the motor drifter, Quartette, Bruce Pym, the pilot, and Percy Bradford. At about half past two in the morning these eight men rowed back to where the Sarah Ann Fanny was lying. Around the stranded vessel was now a seething turmoil of broken water. The wind was blowing at gale force and had brought with it a blinding rainstorm. It was soon clear that there was nothing that the eight could do but return and wait for the dawn.

When dawn came at last Joseph Newman saw that his boat had been smashed to matchwood by the force of the sea. His thirteen drift nets, his ten thousand herring and all his gear had been washed out to sea. The notorious Pole Sand had broken yet another boat and yet another boatowner


The loss of the Sarah Ann Fanny was reported in the Exmouth Journal of 23rd January 1926.

OF BOATS AND GOATS

There is, the sublime Dante devised it, an especially unpleasant place in hell for the "authorities" who stick up signs and notices all over the Estuary to advise, warn, command and inform their fellow men.

Apart from anything else the people who frame these dismal notices are generally unable to handle the English language, our most precious jewel. My pet hates of the moment are those little signs which mar the rails near the sluice gates at Lympstone and which dictate: BOATS MUST NOT BE TETHERED TO THESE RAILS or words to that effect. Nor does there seem sufficient reason why boats should not be 'made fast' there or even, if you must, 'tied up'.

I have been tempted to sneak down there one moonlit night - but the weather has been so cold lately - and neatly transliterate so that 'boats' reads 'goats'. A passing goatherd would be a more likely target for this particular daft diktat.

Fortunately nobody takes much notice of notices but they are an eyesore just the same.

NONSUCH

It was very early on a bright and shining morning in 1969 and in those days we lived at the water’s edge. The tide was creeping up our slipway and I was up and dressed and intent on getting to Exeter. From my doorstep I could see across the broad Exe. Coming up channel was a sight that made me forgo and forget my trip to Exeter. It was an historic two masted vessel gliding up the channel like a ghost ship with no sails set and too far away for me to hear the motor that she ought not to have had. As Coleridge might have put it:

She doth not tack from side to side-
hither to work us weal
withouten wind, withouten tide
she steadies with upright keel.

This was not, however, the Ancient Mariner’s spectre ship nor was it the ship of that Dutchman of Heinrich Heine’ invention who was condemned to sail the sea for ever. It was the replica of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s ketch, Nonsuch, which had been built in Appledore and was now on its way to the canal and so up to the Exeter Maritime Museum.

I leapt into my father’s punt and rowed acoss the tide to Turf. No other boat was moving on the Estuary that morning, only mine and this beautiful seventeenth century vessel. At the lockside I was the only curious visitor and the crew, who had been watching my furious paddling, invited me on board to admire their fine craft, her hiding cabins and her ornate carvings. It was, I felt, a glorious morning and an experience of rare privilege.

PADDLES AND SWEEPS

The word 'oar' was seldom if ever used by the fishermen of the Estuary. All oars were either 'paddles' or 'sweeps' depending essentially on their length. The first and earliest meaning of 'paddle' is the spade of that name used by farmers to clean the ploughshare. The shape of the farmer's paddle explains why the canoeist's paddle used without a rowlock is so called. But here on the Estuary oars are called paddles. This could either be a late joke or an early adoption from the same farmer's fields. When a 'paddle' grows long enough it metamorphoses into a 'sweep'. The oar kept on board the little trawlers was always a sweep.

The long, eighteen foot or so, salmon boats had not rowlocks but tholes and tholes was another ancient Saxon word used and understood on the Estuary. Now there are few tholes to be found. The oaken tholepins were set into holes drilled in the gunwales and could easily and cheaply be replaced. Nowadays the rowlock, in the form of the rounded, metal fork, is universal.

There are people still about who once to order would cut you an oar by hand out of a single plank of timber.

A MURMURATION OF STARLINGS

‘Lovers’, decreed the melancholy Austrian poet, Nikolaus Lenau, ‘should never venture farther apart than the westwind can carry the sweet song of the nightingale.’ But of course these days lone lovers venture to the very ends of the earth.

In the late summer of 1964 I was alone and melancholy and lodging in the attic of the Passage Inn at Topsham. To cheer myself up, I, who had never sailed before, bought, for thirty pounds and at the Cherry and Cherry, Shaldon boat auction, a little boat without a name. I called the boat ‘Bärbel’ after my distant beloved. She was a lovely little sprucebuilt, twelvefoot, lugsail dinghy, straight out of Arthur Ransome.

Anyway the first outing I made with ‘Bärbel, the boat’ was to that part of the river where now the motorway crosses the Exe. I rowed, I did not attempt to sail, among the reed beds and and was enchanted by what I found there. On every reed, or so it seemed, sat a starling. The reeds were bending beneath their weight and there was a noise of chatter and singing everywhere. A few birds, but only a few, allowed me to disturb them but they soon settled again as I passed among them like a Pharoah.

The reed beds are still there and, despite the motorway, the starlings still visit. In that neck of the Estuary I have seen murmurations of starlings since. Sometimes they fly so as to darken the skies. But that first progress of mine, paddling among the reeds nearly fifty years ago to be welcomed to the Estuary by happy starlings, is still one of the most cherished of my memories.

MISJUDGING THE TIDE

I have misjudged the tide but that's no matter. My boat is still leaning awkwardly on the mud but I can soon walk out to her in my short boots and clamber aboard. Once one saw a lot of longbooted walkers and waders out to boats who did not want to waste a moment of the tide. My father used to wade out to his 'punt' relying on a boathook to give him a third leg. This word 'punt' in local usage was given to the open, estuary built, clinker fishing boats of fifteen or sixteen foot, such boats as , in the days of the fishing fleet, carried the men out to their moored craft.

I sit in my stranded boat as though I were a child playing some game of the imagination and for a moment I consider that there might be something ridiculous about sitting in a boat that is lying high and dry and on her side. I have, however, already pushed that thought to the back of my consciousness for there is much to do. I have carried a few unwelcome pints of Exe mud into the boat on my boots and the seagulls have left a spattering of lime on the thwarts and there is some bailing out to be done and fishing lines to be rewound and any amount of cleaning up and tidying ship and squaring things away. It is amazing how much can be found to be done in such a small boat

Meanwhile the water is already lapping around Poppy's keel and there is a breeze and the air is fresh and the banks are fast disappearing and the gulls are wailing, mourning the loss. A little more general boatkeeping and now the tide is under my boat and she has steadied and I can feel her waking from her slumber. I slip her mooring and set my one sail and my Poppy tries but fails to pull herself into the flood. I poke with an oar, usually too early, but eventually she slides and bumps into deeper water and catches the breeze and wings away to glory.

Tomorrow: Back to the Warren.

GOING AGROUND

The Estuary is best enjoyed by little boats. Any boat with a draught of over, say, two feet is asking to be taken to sea and, in the Estuary, is much confined to the channels. The crew has to take soundings or gaze at echo sounders when there are better things to see.

There is a perfectly respectable opinion that ‘going aground’ in the estuary is a thoroughly bad thing, something never to be risked and to be avoided at all costs, and, something, if by misfortune experienced, not to be talked about. This, however, is a very limiting opinion. If sandbanks are always to be given a wide berth then, at a stroke, much of the Estuary becomes out of bounds. Certainly, if small boatowners only feel happy sailing at high water on a ‘good tide’ they miss much of the glory of the Estuary.

The small ‘punts’ that fished the Estuary were always using the sandbanks and mudbanks. If, as sometimes happened, a boat returning home ran out of water under her keel the crew, without fuss, would step over the side of the boat and spread two fisherman’s anchors wide apart in the sand or mud and walk ashore creaking in their long boots. The boat would not complain. She would be quite happy to stay where she was left for as long as was required. The salmon boats were often left so anchored as a matter of course. When the fishing demanded it the boat spent a lonely night far from home. It was once common to see a salmon boat with all her gear floating lonely as a cloud somewhere in the middle of the Estuary.

It was remarkable how cleverly the small ‘punts’ would creep atround the banks only a couple of yards from the sand or mud. Mostly boats were rowed and the Seagull outboard motor only used when winds or tides were unfavourable or when time was pressing. My skipper kept a pint of fuel in a screwtopped pop bottle under a thwart. That was his reserve in total.

It is comforting for the solitary boatsman to know that as a last resort he is strong enough to push his boat off a bank and into deeper water. Ergo, as one grows older and weaker one requires an ever lighter boat for the estuary. For my eightieth birthday I shall be looking for a kayak.



Tomorrow: Keats in Teignmouth

A BOAT FOR THE ESTUARY

Mine is a very little boat. Her name is Poppy and she is of a type called Scaffie. For seven months of the year I keep Poppy on a mooring at Lympstone on the River Exe. This is her fourth year in commission and she has already given me more fun than I deserve. She is one of the smallest boats on the moorings, her overall length being a mere fourteen feet and nine inches, but for me and to fulfil all my dreams and to serve all my purposes she is big enough.

For some forty years I had owned and loved somewhat bigger day boats and when I found this last love, thinking I might be past love, I did not expect to love her half so well as I had loved Bärbel or Lorna or Squab I or Squab II, but in no time at all the little minx had stolen my heart and in the words of the song, ‘I loved her as I never loved before.’

This wonderful boat was designed by the late John Watkinson, the designer of the legendary Drascombe Lugger. He had been a naval officer and there is a touch of romance and panache about every boat he designed. In the dim and distant past I went to the Boat Show and saw the Drascombe Lugger for the first time at the stand of Kelly and Hall, boatbuilders of Newton Ferrers. Like many other people I was enchanted by the design. I loved the tan sails and the piratical rake and the promise that she would ‘jog along under jib and mizzen’. I imagined her jogging through immense shoals of mackerel off Exmouth while I did some serious fishing. Without further ado I commissioned the building of a boat that was the first such on the Exe and which served me well for many years.

When I bought my first Lugger, Squab, I was still in my twenties and my growing family sailed with me. When, however, I decided to buy the Scaffie, Poppy, I was in my sixties and all my chicks had flown and my wife had long since declared that her sailing days were done. It was clear to me that I wouldn’t be needing a big boat. In any case when it come to boats and boating I have always thought small. What I want and need is a small boat in which to potter about the Exe and, on increasingly rare occasions, to sail me through coastal waters on a fairweather day. My boat has to be small enough for me to be able to slide her off the estuary mudbanks whenever Iput her aground. She has to be a rowing boat as well as a sailing boat because it is my delight to row across the calm flood tides. She has to have a simple sail plan because I am a bear of little brain who has always fumbled and confused sheets and halyards. She has to be supplied with a small outboard motor to rush me home whenever I become cold or hungry, weary or queasy.

It was with personal, practical and less than heroic considerations such as these that I went shopping for my boat.

Tomorrow: Something on Peeler Crabs