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Nick Burnham: Less than an hour off high water we drifted up to the quay with 1.3m flashing up briefly – w e’d done it
Writing this, it’s mid November and the weather has been foul!
If it’s not raining it’s blowing a gale. So much for my plan to use the boat more over the winter months. At least I enjoyed a memorable end of season outing with my good friend Steve before the weather closed in, partly due to Marianne being in Ireland and partly due to the fact that Steve is happy to go boating, just not too often, so we have an annual Steve Boating Day ritual.
It was too windy to go to sea so the upper reaches of the River Dart beckoned yet again, but I decided we should explore somewhere different. Instead of heading for Totnes at the head of the navigable river, we’d steam up past Stoke Gabriel a couple of miles upstream, and then hang a left where the river forks into Bow Creek and see how far we could get.
I’m no stranger to Bow Creek, historically at least, but it must be 40 years since I ventured up this particular inlet. My boating career began at the age of about ten years old when my father relented to my childish whine of “I wish we had a boat” (I think he secretly did too) and bought a Drascombe Lugger, which is an 18ft open sailboat with a lifting keel. Slightly more than a dinghy, slightly less than a yacht and very seaworthy for its size. A chap called David Pyle sailed one from Chichester to Australia in the early 1970s (seriously!). Kept on the Royal Dart Yacht Club moorings close to the mouth of the river, my formative boating experiences included tacking up and down the river with the rest of the family – some more enthusiastic about the whole process than others – and a popular dest
