26th to 29th July 2022
We stayed a couple of nights in Chatham - the first time this month when we'd spent more than one night in the same place. We took the opportunity to go by bus to Rochester and visit the castle and cathedral. I have been to the castle before, but it was a very long time ago when I was at primary school; it may have been the first ever school trip I went on. The castle was a lot newer then.
From Chatham we went roughly north-east along the edge of the Thames Estuary. Coming out of the entrance to the Medway we passed the wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery, an American ship that sank near Sheerness in 1944, laden with 1,400 tonnes of explosives. The explosives are still there. When I was growing up in Sittingbourne there were all sorts of stories about what would happen if they went off; I seem to remember the consensus was that all our windows would be broken. The tops of the masts are clearly visible as you sail past, and the wreck is very well marked by a cordon of buoys, so luckily the chances of anyone accidentally sailing into it are remote.
On maps made for land-dwellers, the Thames Estuary looks like a wide expanse of water; and indeed, it can look like that from the sea too, but much of that water is treacherously shallow. There are shifting sandbanks that have caught countless unwary mariners in the past. For the most part, the deeper channels are marked clearly by buoys, and using our chart plotter we were always sure of where we were; but still there was one stretch where the echo-sounder gave us some very low readings, as we were crossing the sand-bar known as the Spitway, near the Gunfleet Sands wind farm.
Our intention was to go into Brightlingsea. This is one of those places that can only be entered at certain states of the tide, and if we'd arrived when we planned to it would probably have been OK; but my planning had been based on taking a prudent view, and we made far better progress than expected, arriving pretty much at low water. We did start to feel our way up the entrance channel, but very soon the echo-sounder was telling us we had 0.0m under the keel, so we opted out. Just over the way from Brightlingsea is Pyefleet, a creek branching off from the River Colne, where there is an anchorage and some mooring buoys. We tied up to one of these and spent a very pleasant, peaceful night on board.
In the morning, when the water was high enough, we went into Brightlingsea briefly so that a couple of people could go ashore to do some much-needed victualling (that's sea-dog language for food shopping, and it's pronounced 'vittling'). They have a little marina there that is accessible near high water, and the staff very kindly allowed us to stay there for half an hour for a small (but surprisingly non-zero) fee. There was a quite feisty breeze pinning us onto the pontoon, and once the provisioning was complete we spent a while debating the best way of reversing the boat out of a fairly narrow entrance in a cross-wind without being blown against an immovable object; but in the event it was far less stressful than we'd feared.
The wind continued to be awkward for several hours. For most of the afternoon we were heading in an approximately north-easterly direction, up the coast past such coastal delights as Clacton and Frinton, and towards Walton on the Naze. Continuing the theme of recent days, we had the tidal stream in our favour but the wind dead against us; this makes for steeper waves, with the result that it was far from being a comfortable sail. We did manage to sail for a while, but this involved tacking, and we were making slow progress, so we eventually put the engine on and pounded into the oncoming seas all the way up to the Naze.
Once we were past this headland our course was more directly north, and suddenly we were able to use Goldfinch as a sailing boat again and still make good progress.
At 1656 on 28th July we passed the Landguard north cardinal buoy at the entrance to Harwich Harbour. On 16th May 2021 we had passed this buoy at the start of our voyage, and turned left up the coast towards Lowestoft. So this was the moment that our homeward track crossed our outward track and the circumnavigation was complete.
We could have gone straight up the Orwell and into Ipswich, but we still had a day in hand, so instead we went up the Stour and moored to a buoy at Wrabness. As the afternoon wore on, the wind died down, and by the evening it was beautifully peaceful once again. We were treated to a most spectacular sunset - a restful end to a tiring day.
The next day there was a gentle easterly wind, just enough to waft us up the Orwell, past familiar sights that we hadn't seen for over a year: the docks of Felixstowe; the historic Butt and Oyster at Pin Mill; Wolverstone Marina; the graceful Orwell Bridge, and then finally Ipswich itself. I picked up the VHF radio.
'Ipswich Lock, this is Goldfinch, over.'
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