Bound for an emotional shipwright reunion
Twinkling stars shining through the hatchway gave me just enough light to savour my surroundings, as I snuffed out the gimballed brass oil lamp on the mast post and closed an old hardback copy of Maurice Griffiths’ Magic of the Swatchways. The plush deep burgundy bunk cushions, the mahogany slats on the cabin sides, the knees and frames and tongue-and-groove cabin top filled me with wonder at the artisans who’d made Snipe of Maldon back in 1953.
Snipe, my 23ft 6in 3½-ton Blackwater Sloop, was halfway home on a sentimental journey back to the Maldon boatyard where she’d been built. Shipwright John Yardley was about to retire and I wanted to surprise him by showing him a boat he had helped give life to five decades before as an apprentice, and to see one last time his ‘little ship’, as Maurice Griffiths, longtime editor of Yachting Monthly, called these estuary cruisers that opened up a world of adventure, not exactly to the working man, but to a new generation of middle-class weekend sailors who were not baronets and earls and millionaire ‘grocers’ like Sir Thomas Lipton.
The 3½-ton Blackwater Sloops cost around the same as a new Morris Minor (about £500), so it was the likes of doctors and teachers who trundled up to the Dan Webb & Feesey yard in Maldon to place orders for a little ship of their own. At the sight of Snipe, I imagined John would be transported back to those days and, with a misty eye, recall how each boat he made was like a child to him, and mine was a particular favourite. It didn’t quite work out like that.
First, I had to get Snipe home. Sceptic that I am I had only ever considered wood as a material for kitchen worktops. That’s why I’d broken the voyage into two legs. In the short, nervy hop from Brightlingsea to Bradwell I’d been pleasantly surprised that Snipe managed the whole passage without sinking once. Nevertheless, before I put my head down at Bradwell I assumed the ‘Stella position’. Unlike the carvel-planked Blackwater Sloop, the Stella, designed by Kim Holman, was of clinker construction and therefore classified as a submarine. I once attended a Stella Leaking–the Stella term for ‘rally’ –to witness a spectacle as impressive as the cascading fountains of Versailles, as a row of Stellas gurgled and blurped, gushing water through hose pipes from the cockpit of one Stella to the next in line, and eventually back into the water.
Steve, my Stella chum
