…neither of them final
As soon as I began planning this trip, or even thinking about it, I began to think about how it might end. A sports psychologist would have complimented me for my ability to visualise success, but it felt wrong to be dreaming about finishing the journey when I was supposed to be enjoying it: after all, this isn’t a journey from A to B where you can debate whether the journey is more rewarding than the destination, the destination is the start point so the only reward for getting there is finishing. I have to say, after months of staring at weather forecasts and tide atlases I am quite looking forward to that reward, especially after the predictable September southwesterlies have meant beating all the way from Cromer, but I am also glad that I had planned in a few final treats before I finish – a big factor in choosing to go clockwise in spite of the beating finish – and, thanks to the thoughtfulness of others, one of these was rather more wonderful than I had dreamed of. I will try not to get over-emotional in print.
The previous post left me tied onto the pontoon in Queenborough, but within 12 hours the ropes were less necessary than the fenders as it blew a full gale from the West the whole day, pinning the boat to the dock as I stuffed the gap with every fender I owned. This is just the kind of enforced stop-over in unforeseen and hitherto unexplored places that the journey is meant to be about: even though I was so close to home I had never been to Queenborough by boat before, and only once by car, so it was an ideal opportunity to see what a 5,000-car car park looks like, and to discover that Queenborough is named after Queen Philippa of Hainault who, as I am sure my erudite readership already knows, was the wife of Edward III, mother of the Black Prince, and all-round medieval Good Egg if Wikipedia is to be believed, taking care of the kingdom while her husband went off on crusades. Rather more oddly, she was voted onto the list of Great Black Britons in 2002 in spite of there being no evidence of at all of her having any ancestry outside Flanders. Presumably some less well-informed voters assumed that the Black Prince was exactly that, and probably also that she came from that oddly-named suburb on the Central Line.
Luckily, before I could disappear down another historico-cultural internet wormhole, Roger and Andrew arrived, it seeming fitting that my two most frequent guests should be on board for the last significant trip: the journey up the Thames to St Katharine Docks. Yes, the management there are very particular about many things, not least spelling Katharine with an a and no apostrophe. I resisted the temptation to ask the internet why.
Queenborough is the recommended jumping-off point for St Katz, as it is known by everyone except its marketing department, avoiding both spelling and grammar issues, but it would take a full six hour tide from there, and since High Water was at 1030 that would mean leaving at a silly hour, so I had instead arranged to spend the night on a mooring buoy off Gravesend. We spent quite a bit of time springing the boat off the dock (last piece of translation for non-sailors: driving the boat hard against a rope to make the stern swing out into a fierce wind that is doing its best to blow you back onto the dock, or in this case onto either of the heritage ships from the festival still moored either side), but eventually we were free to motor hard into this wind around the Isle of Grain and up the north shore of the Hoo Peninsula, with nothing more adventurous to do than bore my guests to tears with a detailed description of every tree, path and house passing on our left hand side, and waving at Philip and Alex who have undoubtedly the nicest house and trees. I don’t recall them having much of a path. It was a more interesting view than Southend, Leigh-on-Sea and Canvey Island, at least in my view. Sadly it doesn’t photograph too well at this distance.
I had originally planned to spend the night on the rather lovely pier (the oldest cast iron pier in the world, don’t you know) but since the sad demise of the Tilbury-Gravesend ferry it’s now in the hands of Thames Clippers, who quoted me £260 + VAT for one night, which was rather a jump from the £30 that it would have cost last year. As it turns out the mooring was a fine place to spend the night: having spent my formative years trying to keep as far as possible from Gravesend except for occasional visits to the fish shop and for tea with Aunty Ro, I’d been past earlier in the year to recce the moorings and found that the promenade (yes! Gravesend has a prom!) has been nicely refurbished along with both piers (yes! Gravesend has two piers!) and there are lots of boats on moorings off the sailing club (yes! Gravesend has a sailing club! And a marina! (of sorts)), along with some very comfortable squishy rubber buoys for passing yachts provided by, of all people, the Port of Lond Authority, who seem surprisingly friendly to yachts and keen to encourage visitors. Sadly, the lack of walk-ashore facilities on the pier meant that we had to forego the eagerly-anticipated trip to see Pocahontas’ grave, but instead had the perfect Gravesend experience: dog-walkers in the park behind the prom, rowers at the rowing club (yes! Gravesend has a rowing club!) and the sun setting behind the mosque and then the church while down below the emergency Fray Bentos Steak and Kidney Pies (non-sailors: every cruising yacht has at least one emergency Fray Bentos item), which I reckoned I wouldn’t need for my last week, wafted non-emergency smells into the cockpit while we watched a highly successful footbal match.
Sadly the weather had of course seen us coming and arranged for our big sightseeing trip up the Thames to be grey and rainy. This was more of a shame for Andrew and Roger who hadn’t been up the Thames by boat before, whereas I could find it authentically grim. In truth, it is a lot less grim than when I first sailed up it, although I really wasn’t paying attention then as we were in a Thames Barge Match and I had to wind a large winch 110 turns every few minutes as we tacked all the way from Gravesend. No such physical exercise today: we took turns to hide under the sprayhood until the urge to see the sights drove us out, when miraculously it sort of dried up a bit. Roger managed to overtake a massive lorry carrier under the Dartford Crossing…
…Andrew managed to avoid both Woolwich Ferries…
…and I managed not to hit any of the Thames Barrier…
…and then we were in pure sightseeing country, and the blog turns into the dreaded travelogue, and all those nailed-on awards disappear in a puff of predictability:
Just as the best view of all appeared, it was time to make myself unpopular by suggesting that we needed some ropes and fenders out as we were there…
…although I’m pleased to see that Roger disobeyed orders long enough to get the best picture of all:
Everyone at St Katz was as helpful and friendly as they should be at the price they charge, the showers were almost as classy as the ones in Aberystwyth and there were the required number of coffee shops, bakeries and chain restaurants to reassure us that we were in Central London. More to the point, a select few blog-reading friends made it down for lunch, beer, dinner and so on, which was sort of the plan, and having done my best to take Blue Moon back to her previous homes (not too successfully – only two out of four but there is always next year) it was time for me to take myself home. Tempting as it was to jump on the tube and be in my actual home in half an hour, I went for the full ‘yacht in London’ experience, and got one final traveloguey picture to show for it:
I hadn’t expected to race back down the Thames, but the Belgian boat I’d spent the day in Queenborough next to was leaving at the same time and they waited to let me past so they could hoist their sails off Tower Bridge. That kind of showing off needed no second invitation, so my sails were up in no time in an attempt to keep ahead of a boat at least 10 feet longer with a full crew.
How fortunate then that Andrew had walked down to the Cutty Sark to take my picture as I went past – first to capture how far behind the Belgians were…
…then to get a decent video of me calling for water on a Thames Clipper:
Rather annoyingly we both had to take our sails down for the Thames Barrier and I was too slow getting mine up again, the Belgians squeaked past and I spent the rest of the day trying to cut inside them on every bend. Nothing worked: at Allhallows they carried on to Nieuwpoort and I headed up across Grain Hard to The Medway.
This was the proper homecoming. Yes, I keep the boat at Itchenor. Yes, I belong to Itchenor Sailing Club and like it and at least some of the people in it. But I’m very clear that my sailing home is The Medway, so in many ways this does feel like the culmination of the trip, even though I still have 160 miles to go, and I have spent the last few days telling people not to congratulate me as I haven’t finished yet.
I spun the experience out as long as I could. First, rather than heading straight up the river for my first night, I made for Stangate Creek, every Medway sailor’s favourite anchorage. I had it all to myself for about 10 minutes until a motorboat came and anchored right next to me.
A calm motor upriver on the tide with a bacon roll next morning, quietly ticking off the buoys and the creeks I grew up with, was the perfect way to arrive, followed up with two pretty perfect ways of making the whole weekend properly memorable. First, a day of creek-crawling with my sister Kate and brother-in-law Peter. We were pleased to see we could still remember how to get through Hoo Creek but upped the ante by making it up Otterham Creek, where neither of us had ever sailed, and only hit each side of it once. This really is the right place for a lifting keel.
To cap off the proper Medway experience, we even came across the Raybel, a Barge that Kate and Peter had watched being restored by a community trust in Sittingbourne, now sailing for her first season:
Finally, the real homecoming that wasn’t. I’d mentioned to a couple of friends that I might be at the Medway Yacht Club for a day or two in September, and Wendy had kindly invited me to race a Dragon with her (non-sailors: the class of boat I used to race a long time ago), and Philip had suggested a quick supper afterwards.
Plans had changed: Wendy had signed me up with Chris and David who, in spite of never having met me, and also in spite of it being forecast to blow Force 6, insisted I helm their Dragon while they did all the hard work pulling all the strings. This was the best afternoon’s sailing I’ve had in a long time, and we’d have won a race if we had understood the course, honest. Thank you Chris, thank you David.
Then Philip had quietly invited ‘one or two people’ along for supper in the club. 30 of them, and I was expected to make a speech. I forgave him for this, because it really was wonderful to see so many old friends and a couple of new ones, most of whom my parents and I had raced against all those years ago. I rambled on for far too long with far fewer and less funny jokes than my Dad would have told, but they were polite enough to smile and not head to the bar before I’d finished. What a terrific evening, and a terrific weekend. I didn’t take pictures of the rapt audience, they’ll be pleased to hear, but I did take two of the boat looking quite at home in my sailing home:
We will be back, of that I am quite sure.
Blue Moon's trip around the UK 
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