Maldon
October 1995
Of course, the boat was still in the same condition as it had been when i'd gone away. It was ready for sailing, but we still had to put the sails on and rig it up. That wasn't a very big job but, predictably, the weather had turned really miserable now, since the equinox, so we didn't do anything for a while. Then, when we finally took the sails down to the boat, we discovered the mainsail had lots of small holes in it, it looked like patches of the canvas had rotted and disintegrated. Shit! Just when you think you've finally got it together, something else happens. It was obviously no good like that. Fortunately the foresail was ok, but you couldn't really sail without a mainsail.
We went to the sailmakers to see what they thought about repairing it, but it was obvious there wasn't much point in trying. The amount of work involved would cost much more than the sail was worth. And anyway, once it had started rotting, the whole thing was likely to just fall apart at any time. We certainly couldn't afford the more than two hundred quid a new one would cost, so the situation looked quite hopeless.
A few days later, we found another sail. A spare foresail from a bigger boat which my mum had sold a while before. Just out of interest, we compared the two and found there was very little difference in size or shape. We took the foresail into the sailmakers to get them to convert it, which would be considerably cheaper than getting a new one made. After that, we decided to put the old one on the boat and use it till the wind ripped it too much to use any more. We thought we might as well get the last little bit of use out of it.
- - -
On Sunday, the eighth, i went to the White Horse pub in Maldon High Street in the early afternoon to meet Terry, my oldest friend, who was usually in there at that time on a Sunday. The weather had suddenly turned hot again. The sun was out and brightening up everything in sight and it was quite warm enough to walk down there in shorts, t-shirt and bare feet. I'd met Terry when we were in the same class in the second year at secondary school, when we were about twelve, twenty five years before. We didn't see much of each other any more, as we lived on opposite sides of the planet, but when i was back in Maldon, we usually went out and had a few drinks together now and then.
I spent a pleasant two or three hours drinking pints of Murphy's stout and talking to Terry and his brother-in-law. Terry was working on a local farm and we had a good chat about growing things and environmentally friendly agriculture, which was something i'd never discussed with him before.
Eventually everyone else left the pub and the landlord decided to close up. It had only been a couple of months since the licencing laws had changed in Britain, allowing pubs to stay open all afternoon on Sundays and of course they were very slow to adapt! At least we weren't chucked out till about four, which was much better than the old Sunday closing time of two o'clock. Terry and Tom went off home for dinner and i decided to take a walk down the quay and have a look at the water.
I tried to have a pint in the Queen's Head, which was right on the quay, but amazingly they were closed too, so i ended up going for a walk along the river and standing for a while watching a big group of swans and ducks swimming about, obviously enjoying the sudden improvement in the weather.
For some reason, i decided to walk back towards the quay. I was a bit pissed and in a wandering mood and i couldn't think of anywhere else to go. Not far from the quay i ran into Hilary, another old friend of mine who i hadn't seen for ages and had been trying to track down. She was with a group of half a dozen or more people who she'd been at the pub with. They'd all been away sailing on a barge the previous week and were about to head off to their homes again.
I went round to Hilary's with them and hung around there for a while. Hilary told me that another friend of ours, Paul was down from London for the weekend, which was good as i'd been trying to get round to seeing him for a long time. I ended up going out on the piss that evening with Paul and getting seriously drunk.
The next day the tide and the weather were right to go for a sail. It looked like it could be the last opportunity of the year and miraculously neither me nor my mother had anything else we had to do. This time we finally made it. Three months after starting to work on the boat, we managed to get out for a sail. I could hardly believe it!
We put the old sail on and got it rigged up in a dodgy sort of way and off we went. Paul came along for the ride and so did Rosie, my sister's three year old daughter. The boat looked a right state as we tacked up the river into the wind. The sail was full of small holes, the ropes were all unraveling at the ends, due to never having been properly spliced and there was a small hole in the side of the hull which i'd filled before we painted it, but had knocked out again when i put the new seat in a month before. But it sailed. And it was a perfect day for it. Although i didn't feel in anything like the perfect condition - due to a bad hangover from the previous day's heavy drinking.
We ended up sailing the mile or two up the river to Maldon, where we parked up at the quay outside the Queen's Head and went in for a pint or two. My sister met us there with her two youngest kids, Megan and Stuart. Rosie and Paul jumped ship at that point, leaving me and my mum to sail back down to the Basin on the ebbing tide.
- - -
So we'd finally got a sail in after all those months! We had another one a few days later too, but high tide was much later and it was a bit too windy really. We had Anna, James and Jenny, my sister's three oldest kids with us and we were out till nearly dark. It looked like that would probably be the last time we'd go sailing that year as it began to get really cold not long after that and going sailing in freezing weather isn't my idea of fun. People do it, but they're crazy!
I didn't know it then, but it was the last time i'd ever go sailing in that boat, as it was smashed up in a storm a few years later - before i made it back to Britain again.