Up to my armpits in mud
September 1st 1995
I spent the first ten years of my life wading around in the mud of the River Blackwater at Mill Beach - or so it seemed afterwards. Of course, neither i nor my sister and two brothers actually spent the whole time up to our necks in mud, but we certainly spent a significant proportion of the summers like that. There's something very satisfying slopping around barefoot in river estuary mud - it has to be barefoot, it's just not the same in boots. The way the mud squishes up between your toes has got something to do with it i suppose!
Anyway, wading around in the mud is something i never seem to get to do anywhere else in the world except Maldon. Mind you, Maldon does seem to have more than it's fair share of the stuff! The locals occasionally refer to the town as "Maldon-On-The-Mud", a kind of parody of a "Southend-on-Sea" type of name, i guess - although Southend also seems to have more mud than sea. And there used to be a race across the river at the quay every Boxing Day, called the "mad Maldon mud race". I didn't know if they still had it or not.
Australia's not a very muddy place, due, i suppose, to the fact that the soil there is based on sand, unlike the clayey soil of Britain. But when i've been back to Maldon recently i've managed to get back to my muddy roots somehow and Friday the first of September provided an opportunity to do it again.
My mum's boat still wasn't fit for sailing, of course, due to the fact that neither of us had been around that part of the world much in the last few weeks. It was still floating, however, which was a good omen. I began to get the feeling that if i didn't do something drastic soon, we'd get the thing finished in time for winter - if we were lucky - and then of course, it would sit there in the frost and snow deteriorating, only needing to be worked on again the following summer. I was slowly developing a hatred of boats, but this was no time to let that get to me, it was a time for action. And if i was going to do anything, i had to do it right there and then, if it was going to get done before i headed off to the mainland in a few days.
The day before, with my mum and my sister's two oldest kids on board, i'd sculled the boat the few hundred yards up the river to the boatyard to pick up the mast, spars and a few other things. They'd been sitting there since my last visit, nearly two years before, when we'd taken the boat in to get it fixed up a bit. So on the Friday, there was no excuse left for not sorting it out and putting it all back together.
Finally, we had come to a time when we were able to work on it and the tides were right - that is, it was low tide in the middle of the day when we wanted to work on it. The tide, of course, had been one of the major obstacles to doing this work - it's no good being around and ready to do it, if the tide's up and you can't get out there to work. Of course, you can work on a boat that's floating, but it's a much more awkward task.
It was just after the new moon and the weather, as usual, had taken a turn for the worse. It was overcast and not very warm - but at least it wasn't raining. Often, when the weather's not so good, it seems to be a lot colder on the river, but that day was the opposite if anything, for some reason, and the squelchy feel of the mud squishing up between my toes made me forget it was colder than i would have liked - the temperature of the mud was pretty much the same as it would have been if the sun was out. I waded out to where the boat sat at its mooring, about a hundred or so yards from the seawall, and made a thorough assessment of the situation.
The bottom of the mast went through a bracket that was fixed onto the back of the front seat, and fitted into a rectangular hole in a piece of wood attached to the keel, in the bottom of the boat. Neither of these fittings were in place. The piece of wood with the rectangular hole in it was in fact in our shed on the seawall, preserved from rotting by the fact that it had spent most of its life submerged in the salt water which was always in the very bottom part of the boat, so there shouldn't have been any problem nailing that back in place. But the bracket a bit higher up wasn't going to be so simple. It was alright itself, being made of steel, but what it should attach to wasn't in very good shape. The front seat was as rotten as only the bits of a wooden boat above the water line seem to be capable of getting. I thought of patching it up, but as well as the fact that it hardly seemed worth the work attaching good wood to bad, it's also a virtually impossible task. No, the whole seat had to be replaced - this could be a harder job than i'd thought.
But in the end, it proved a lot easier than it looked at first glance and by midday the next day we had a new seat, complete with the two elbow-shaped wooden brackets which hold it to the the sides of the boat. It took a bit of work to get it all to fit together properly, but it wasn't very long before i was hammering in the copper nails that would hold it together till probably well after the rest of the boat had completely disintegrated. However, by the time i came to do that job, it was pissing down.
The thought of wading around in the mud of a southern England river estuary in the pissing rain in September isn't a vision that's instantly appealing, but as it happened, it was a pleasant and satisfying job. The tide was coming up and had just about reached the boat when we got the mast in and it was a happy sight, to see it floating on that first bit of water, with its mast up and a clean new seat, looking like it was being cared for. And with the tide came the good weather.
The sun came through the clouds as my mum, my nephew and me stood around in the mud and salt water, looking at the newly-finished job. Hmmm..., we said, it was a real shame we hadn't got the sail rigged up, or we could have gone sailing right there and then. But it was a bit of a job getting that ready - and anyway, we didn't have the sails there with us, so it was pretty much out of the question really. But as the tide slowly crept in and we moved gradually towards the shore with it, pulling the boat with us, i thought bugger it! after all that work, and with this unexpected good weather and the fact that i was going away for a month the next day, i just wanted to get in the thing and float about a bit. It didn't matter whether we sailed or not. So we grabbed the oars and pushed it out into the tide.
As long as i can remember, i'd know how to propel a boat by means of a single oar sticking out the back, a traditional method, known in those parts as "sculling". The only other place in the world i'd seen this done was in Flores, a few months before, but that didn't mean people didn't do it anywhere else. You didn't even see it so much around the Blackwater those days, with the demise of the cargo and fishing industries there - the modern "yachties" don't seem to have the skill or desire to do such things, outboard motors being much less work. But, as i said, i'd been doing this since i was a kid, and it's something that, although i didn't get the opportunity to do it much any more, i enjoyed a lot. So off we went, out into the river, for a scull around.
As we came back towards the seawall, my sister, her husband and their other five kids came along, obviously lured out by the newly arrived sunny weather. So of course, there was nothing else to do but pile them all in and go back out again.
The place where the boat lives, off the seawall at Heybridge Basin, is only a few hundred yards away from the bungalows on the seawall at Mill Beach, where we lived till i was ten. There's a couple of little islands, out in the middle of the mud, where we used to play when i was young, and we stopped at the largest one of these and got out for a while. My nieces and nephew had fun running around in the mud, eating samphire and just being on a little, sort of kid-sized island. I was glad we'd finally had a splash around in the boat after all those weeks of trying to get it sorted out.