Chapter 6 A Launch at Lunchtime

Over the winter of 1976/7 I finished off the inside of the boat and, a few days before Easter, put a good coat of International TBT Antifouling (tri-butyl tin - now banned) on the bottom ready for launching. I also bought a very secondhand outboard - a British Seagull 102 longshaft. This was already about thirty years old but it was the cheapest 5hp motor I could find - it cost me £40 from a small boat chandlers in Horley near Gatwick of all places.

We fixed the launch for the Easter break, and my parents came down for the occasion, our friend Jean Davies came to help (her husband Paul was working), and Linda’s parents joined us for the launch. Here we are getting the boat on its trailer out of our front garden - a pretty daunting task in itself. Reading from left to right we see Jean, my Dad, Gordon (an ex-pupil of mine and son of a neighbour) and me. In the second picture apart from the humans we see Jean’s VW Camper, our Renault 6, Fram and my Dad’s MG Magnette, aka an Austin Cambridge in drag.





This picture shows me loading the Seagull outboard into my Dad’s car boot and him with his pipe on the go.



I’d arranged a mooring in Newhaven - not at the Marina (expensive) but up the River Ouse a bit in the creek around Denton Island (an island smaller than our back garden, but lined with yacht moorings). We’d arranged to use the boatyard slip to launch, and we drove down there to arrive late in the morning on Easter Saturday. There was no-one at the boatyard except a bloke working in the big shed where they built the Vancouver 27 yacht. Our first discovery was that there was a dirty great motor catamaran parked on the slip, and the tide hadn’t yet come in. The second discovery was that there was no-one about to move the catamaran. It was an ocean survey vessel. In this picture you can see my Mum wondering how we were going to launch - our fallback position, we decided right away, was to leave Fram tied up on the slipway until the Tuesday when presumably there’d be someone about to move the cat.



So we manouevred the trailer on to the slipway and undid all the tie-downs and loose gear. In this shot, from right to left, there's my Dad, me bent over, Linda's father Les restraining the boat and Linda and my Mum looking on. Linda, incidentally, was two months pregnant at this time. More of this later.



Then we had the naming ceremony - my Mum and I christening the Fram with a can of lager. The tide had started to creep up the slip by then, so we waited until there was sufficient depth of water and then floated Fram off.



And this is as far as the two old blokes went into the water.



But I was waist deep by the time it was off the trailer and we had secured mooring lines. I didn't need to go that far in but I hadn't done this before and I was determined that no damage should befall my immaculately painted hull. It was friggin' freezing! Easter, remember, and a fairly early one at that. Needless to say the parents stood around laughing.



And there we were - all that remained that day was for me to change into dry clothes - for once I'd had the foresight to bring some - and to take the boat on its first voyage - motoring the 200 yards to the mooring.