A BIT AGROUND

A ROOKIE SKIPPER AND HIS FRIENDS HAVE MORE OF AN ADVENTURE THAN THEY BARGAINED FOR

A satisfying feature of looking after this column for the last 16 years has been the latitude granted me by editors for selecting material. This has delivered enough slack to celebrate the less spectacular among the yarns of derring-do and sheer survival. ‘Travels with my Nan’, published by the ever-inventive Lodestar Books and written by Nick Imber, tells of three generations of a family growing up with a small barge yacht in the Thames estuary.

The opening lines set the scene perfectly: ‘I first met her in Tollesbury and immediately fell for her. She was Essex Girl through and through, but not like the others, although she was shallow. There were only two problems. The age difference – she was born in 1904 and I was ten back then in 1959. None of this mattered to me but the second problem would be trickier; my Dad loved her too.’

We join Nick on his inaugural passage as a teenage skipper with a crew of fellow students. Like many a first trip, it doesn’t go as smoothly as he’d have liked, but the account smacks of an earlier, more innocent age than ours. The buoys may have changed, but the sands have not as the crew stand bravely out across the wide, cluttered waters of the Thames, aided only by steel leeboards and a Seagull outboard engine.

We slipped our mooring and set off along Gravesend Reach bound for Leigh. Flo volunteered to go below and make a hot drink.

“Nick,” she shouted up the companionway, “why is there water over the floorboards?”

“There shouldn’t be!” I said. Handing the tiller to a startled Pete I ducked below.