Chapter 4 Beyond Potter Heigham again

There’s a sailing hiatus now, from 1966 to 1974, so skip the next couple of paras if it’s only boats you’re interested in. In those years I took my A-levels, with ignominious results, and spent most of the spring and summer of 1967 in St Ives, living in a pillbox on the cliffs near Lelant. After which I went to College, Linda and I met, married and made a home (all in Brighton) as the '60s turned into the '70s, and I spent a year as the full-time president of our Student Union. Linda got a job immediately after graduating, but I pretended I didn’t need either a job or a degree, and set up a small publishing company with three friends (only one of whom had any money to invest) to produce a free fortnightly listings magazine in Brighton – a sort of local version of Time Out. I edited it, wrote most of it, and did all the illustrations and layout. It lasted three issues before the bloke with the money withdrew what was left of it from the Bank. In the meantime I did supply teaching to supplement Linda’s salary, but it became obvious that I wasn’t being fair to her, and that dreams of a local publishing empire were simply dreams. At about the same time in Brighton the vile Hoogstraten was turning his dreams into reality around the corner from us by burning out inconvenient tenants from old properties he had bought. I'm glad we didn't meet.

So I got work as a teacher of Technical Drawing and Printing (honestly) in a school which was scheduled to close within three years (Queen’s Park Secondary, Brighton), from where, in 1974, I moved on to what had been the largest Comprehensive School in the UK, Thomas Bennett in Crawley, to teach Graphics, Art, and Motor Mechanics (again, honestly) but not simultaneously.

By 1976 I was starting to think about boats again. I wanted to take Linda sailing and I also wanted her to experience the Broads. Her parents fancied a Broads holiday too, so the idea was that they would hire a two-berth motorboat and we would hire a two berth sailing boat; they, with their far better cooking and washing facilities, would act as the mother-ship, going ahead each day to secure a decent mooring for that night while we swanned gracefully around enjoying the scenery and the sailing. We went to Martham again to hire, but this time to the Martham Boat Building and Development Company, a grandiose name for what was a pretty shoe-string outfit; but they were cheap.

We hired the Jenny, (and here we are sailing it on Whiteslea near Hickling) a two-berth gaff-rigged river cruiser with the usual leaky, smelly loo, but this time a 1.5 horsepower Stuart Turner petrol inboard, advertised as “easy hand start”.

Ha! We also took our large dog, a cross Great Dane/Alsatian called Killer (the name was funny when she was a little cuddly puppy). She had never been on a boat before.

Linda’s parents hired the Jayne, a two berth motor cruiser with a proper(ish) loo and what sounded like the engine from an old London Bus.

For obvious reasons (the trauma of holidaying with one’s in-laws - and here they are) I can’t remember too much



about the week, except that it was pretty cold, it rained a bit and blew half a gale – one of those “Roger’s blasts” you get on the Broads, probably about force six in the gusts - the day we were on Hickling Broad with full sail up. I decided to reef. To do this on a Broads yacht of that vintage you have to come head to wind, lower the gaff a bit using both peak and throat halyards, leave it all flogging while you tie in the reef, then hoist again. Well, it works when there’s not much wind. In the minor hurricane we had the boom danced about all over the place, the gaff refused to come down at all, let alone far enough to reef, and the mud weight (all that these boats have for an anchor – a 26lb lump of iron) dragged. We ended up in very shallow water, drifting closer and closer to the reed beds on the lee shore; I hadn’t started the engine. I was on the foredeck swinging on the luff of the mainsail to try to get it down, yelling at Linda to hold the boom still. The boom was lifting her off her feet and threatening to drop her over the side. She was not impressed with my captaincy. I finally managed to get the main right down, then the jib, ran back to the cockpit and started (not easily) the easy start engine, raced back up to the foredeck to pull up the mudweight (covering myself and everything else with mud), and finally managed to get the boat back into the dredged channel. Linda spent some time telling me never to speak to her like that again – and I never have.

One other highlight of the week stands out in my memory: we were tacking up the Thurne really efficiently, using the whole width of the river, bank to bank, making good speed, when Killer the dog decided she’d had enough. As I executed one particularly fine turn, inches off someone’s garden quay-heading, the dog stepped off the boat and stood on their manicured lawn, watching us as we sailed away on the opposite tack. We did a very quick 360 and grabbed her as we went past again, alternately cussing her and laughing.

By the end of the week we were handling the boat pretty confidentally, we'd agreed that hoisting the mainsail was my job, we'd learned not to worry about the three or four inches of bilgewater slopping about under the cabin sole at the end of a day's sail, and we'd even managed to sleep for almost the whole night on the ancient interior-sprung bunk mattresses which smelt of mould. And we'd almost mastered the easy-hand-start engine. Here we are moored up in Neatishead Cut one afternoon towards the end of the week.





But if this holiday didn’t convince Linda that sailing was the thing for her, it decided me that I needed a boat.