BoatBlog

I can only talk about 2 days of this fun 3 day event, since I opted to go down to Marchwood Sailing Club on the Saturday morning, when the Kittiwake was already berthed there, and sail around Saturday (with Bill, Jeremy Smallwood and Dave Price) and Sunday (with Bill, Jeremy Smallwood and Oliver), leaving the Kittiwake at Marchwood mid-afternoon Sunday.It was a useful introduction to sailing for someone whose total experience has been so far limited to a 1 hour sailing lesson on a sun boat in Jamaica. I guess the prominent thing about that weekend was the lack of wind; it had caused Bill and Jeremy a long, slow journey from St Denys to Marchwood on the Friday, and it carried on that way. This meant that sailing down to Calshott on the Saturday morning took hours and hours – and the sailing was interspersed with rowing and motoring. But I like rowing, so that’s OK.

Low tide was rapidly approaching when we weighed anchor in Ower Pond, by the oil refinery at Calshott. Several of the Drascombes rafted up together and had fun drifting about in great flotillas - at one point taking our anchor cable with them. Why anyone should want to interrupt their lunch by starting up their outboard motors and drifting around shouting at each other was something that I learned the reason for as the weekend went on. It’s not what you actually achieve so much as the process of experimentation and decision-making that is important.

On the way back up Southampton Water, what wind there was seemed to be coming from the wrong direction, and I learned a lot about tacking, mainly from being shouted at when I was helmsman. “Ready about! All clear! Lee Ho!” I can remember this last term easily, because it’s like the name of a Chinese restaurant in Gerrard Street in London which I used to frequent – a name I had better not repeat in full, since the last syllable could easily be confused with a very commonly used Anglo-Saxon word. Sailing upwind was great (if time-consuming): it still seems miraculous to a novice like me that you can use the wind to go in the direction it isn’t going. It’s a bit like radio; I don’t really understand it at all.

Saturday night sleeping under canvas on the boat was a great experience. It was how I imagine sleeping in a coffin might be – only a gently rocking, very comfortable coffin, coccooned and swaddled. There was no room to move at all, and I had my shoulder stuck in a locker, as Bill had said I would. The Marchwood side of the Test is a strange place, a mix of fairly intimate little rural villages, woods and marshes dwarfed by the gigantic container dock just across the water. The lights and noise of the container dock, active 24 hours a day, filtered through the canvas, but I had my earplugs. Sleep came instantly.

Sunday morning seemed better sailing; we actually managed to get all the way up to Eling and back without any help from oars or motor. Was the wind better? Or was it because we were joined by someone who actually knew what they were doing, so as an ignorant crew member I was in a minority (one out of four).

Oren Stone

The trip up the Hamble from Bursledon to Botley Mill and back, stopping at the Horse and Jockey in Curbridge for a leisurely lunch, made a change from rowing through the semi-industrial wonderland of the lower Itchen. We took 8 kayaks on the trailer, and one of the skiffs on the roof of a car, and had a great time. The weather smiled: there was quite a lot of sun for a British April day, and in fact it just started clouding over as we finished. It was lovely to canoe through really country landscape. Parts of Hamble country park remind me very strongly of the salt water lagoons of eastern North Carolina (just inside the Outer Banks where the Wright Brothers took off in their plane in 1903) - wide, shallow stretches of water fringed with primeval looking forest and inviting creeks. Further up towards Botley, in places the gardens were flooded by the high tide, with clusters of lovely yellow flowers just beneath the surface of the water. Paddling over them was a little bit like snorkelling across a coral reef. Nice to see the young ducklings and smell the wild garlic in the woods - an overpoweringly sweet smell, contrasting beautifully with the smell of the M27 as we paddled under it past the posh boats back to base.

Someone has to go in the water on every trip, to make it perfect. As we launched the kayaks from the pub garden after lunch, Bev was pushed energetically down the grassy slope into the water by two eager men, in her narrow kayak. The bank sloped to one side, and the boat promptly tipped over, leaving her standing, surprised, waist high in the water.

Oren

We have a lot of fun in boats in the St Denys Sailing & Rowing Club. This blog will give our members a way of sharing their experience & enthusiasm.

Contributions  are welcomed from any member - you can email them to me and I’ll post them when I can get round to it, or I can register you as a contributor and you can post stuff yourself whenever you like.

Jeremy Smallwood