My friends in New Zealand sent me a few views of the abandoned hulk of a coastal scow. These craft were once a common sight around the coasts of New Zealand – especially the North Island. I was sent a long time ago a picture of, I believe, one of the last scows.

The above vessel is thought to be the Jane Gifford and thought to date to 1924.

It is thought that around 130 – 140 of these vessels built between c1870 to around 1925. The largest were able to sail the Pacific to the American west coast. Most worked the coasts, rivers and shallow creeks – familiar isn’t it! The last of the original vessels were still around, working under power into the 1960s.

A replica scow was built in 1993 and named after a man closely associated with the vessels. The vessel, the Ted Ashby, can be seen at: http://www.maritimemuseum.co.nz/voyager-live

The vessels were originally a direct copy of American Great Lakes types, but soon evolved into a New Zealand vessel, especially with the bow shape. Some early vessels were fitted with leeboards, but they hampered cargo work – log carrying being the main. Was an ‘old’ Thames man out there…? Centre plates soon became the means to give the flat bottomed vessels a grip when sailing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scow and http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~tonyf/scows/index.html

The views of the remains of a vessel up on a beach kind of struck a chord with me: its reminiscent of our own Thames barges. The centre plate casing can clearly be seen. The vessel was diaganol planked too and had substantial chine timbers. Interesting…

It is a reminder that all countries will have the remnants of coastal traders lurking in forgotton corners. It is hoped that a historic record has been kept…

Anyway, my thanks to Paul, an old Leigh-on-Sea man, for sending me these…

One of the joys of being part of the ‘great unemployed’ is the ability to use facilities that are there for all of us. The Mate and I have been regular participants at a series of monthly lectures/talks at the Essex Records Office in Chelmsford since the dear girl’s retirement from gainful employment at the beginning of 2013.

Not all of the talks are to my taste, but we support each other’s – they being well aligned on the whole. There have been some great subjects over the past year too. They include subjects such as the prehistoric Blackwater through to Roman and Saxon times – and what is being found now with loss of river silts, especially around the flats between Osea and the mainland; and the Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey.

This past week it was the turn of the Pioneer Sailing Trust to wow us. Now I know a little about the trust and what it does, and its vessel, the Skillinger Smack Pioneer. The talk was given by trust volunteer Brian Tourny – very good it was too…

The Pioneer out by the Gunfleet in July 2009.

What I wasn’t fully aware of was the extent they have continued. I knew about the John Constable, a Stour lighter rebuilt and completed last year. I didn’t know about the way the trust has become a school for marine studies, specifically the care, repair and reconstruction of old wood built vessels.

Pioneer preparing for sea, July 2011, about to drop her mooring…

Some while ago when in Harwich I spoke to the educational person on the Mayflower Project – a new ship is growing up there in the north-east of Essex. I asked why a greater level of sharing wasn’t instituted within the marine environment with respect to the training of shipwrights with the ability to work on old as well as new vessels. The Cambria Trust had a training system while the barge was being rebuilt, but, surely, it has ended now that the project has been completed. I do know hat some of the trainees went out into the industry – great. Over at lower Halstow, the Westmoreland Trust will be doing the same – will they work with the pioneer trust, perhaps, or maybe not. perhaps I should inject the idea…

Back to the Pioneer Trust: what they are doing is to my mind quite exceptional. It has clearly been managed with a lot of dedicated hard work by volunteers … but as Brian said, ‘…all of a sudden we became responsible for the employment of people … their teaching and welfare…’ The trust not only looks at the ‘wood’ side of things, but the mechanicals involved with vessels. They are also now into restoring smacks, yachts, and the building of an all wood skiff. A recent project has been the refurbishment of an old Trinity House Tender.

The Pioneer sailing away down the Colne with a party od Primary school children aboard… I wtched chart explanations going on as we sailed in close company…

The trust can be found here: http://www.pioneersailingtrust.org.uk/ They are based at Harkers Yard, Brightlingsea … I for one am looking to visit sometime.

There is a welcome piece of news on the web site of the Medway & Swale Boating Association:

See: http://msba.org.uk/?p=1423#comment-8032

Work is being carried out to put it back into operation. A new pontoon has arrived and the link span is being reinstated. Berthing of spritsail barges and other pleasure craft to embark/disembark passengers will be taking place.

As I understand at present the facility will be open for pleasure yachts (that’s me and you) to stop over for a short period to enable stores to be obtained or partake of a luncheon ashore. What the limits are I am not aware (I have written to Medway Council – at present there has been nil response). Check it out if you love pottering…

What is now needed is the reinstatement of the possibility to get ashore at Ship Pier, right in Chatham Bight. And too the old facility up at Strood…

One of my favourite ‘Medway Views’  just off the position of Sun Pier… Lovely!

The future of the Queenborough All Tide Landing appears to have been secured. While in Queenborough last week doing a talk at the yacht club the commodore told me that there were still a few issues to iron out, but that broadly an agreement had been entered into with the Queenborough Harbour Trust.

It is expected that the facility will be back in use by the end of April…

See this link on the web site of the Medway & Swale Boating Association: http://msba.org.uk/?p=1426

The ATL in use last year when the Clipper Yachts were in the night before the start off Southend Pier… The ATL can be see (just) to lhs – the British entry was alongside…

Further to the above, the harbour trust has purchased a concrete pontoon (ex Gosport Ferry…) which is to moored to the south of the All Tide Landing linked by a bridge. My understanding is that this facility may only be for the harbour trust and the yacht club. Te info says that it is to be anchored … I rather think piles would be more suitable!

Interesting developments are taking place … as most people who know me; I am a long term fan of the historic town and have known it since around 1960 … when the glue factory was still operating on the south side of the town’s creek!

See: http://msba.org.uk/?p=1417

Last year Hoo Marina was bought out by the Port Werberg (Swann Marine) Group and the marina was made out of bounds to visiting yachts. For me this was a blow: the mate and I have been going into the basin most summers for several decades.

I knew the area as a boy too and many happy memories can be found swirling within my mind of being moored off the marina concrete barge wall on the May Flower…

Anyway, after corresponding with the marina’s owners I have been told that the status quo remains … visitors are not welcome. I was offered no further information and it must be assumed that this facility is no longer open to cruising yachts … nor will the friendly club be ‘open’ to us either, unless one nips in, in the dinghy from several waiting buoys out in the river along the mud edge (when tide recedes – note these can put you on the mud!). Not a likely scenario…

Hoo Marina – seen from the west in Cockham Reach – looking towards the houseboats ringinging the outer concrete barge wall…

Hoo Marina had a nice feel. It was friendly. You could wander around … get the washing done and good stores could be had from the village too. Regular bus services into Rochester and Chatham were often used by Whimbrel’s crew. Chatham marina is ‘alright’ but is sterile in comparison…

I’m sad. The mate is sad!

While aboard the Gransden’s Edith May last weekend the mate and I sat at a table which already had several people, a lady and two gentlemen, seated enjoying their luncheon. Jane Gransden, when taking our order, asked if we’d been introduced … we soon were. http://www.edithmaybargecharter.co.uk/

Ed at work…

The lady, Linda Moffat, had a connection back to my childhood time spent in Maldon during 1964: her cousin is John Prime who then owned the Gipping. My father borrowed John’s electric drill to drill pin holes in several short lengths of scaffold tube to fit in the rudder gudgeons when withdrawing the May Flower’s pin … for refurbishment.

Viewed from the May Flower on Cooks Yard Blocks, 1964, My Alice CK348 then owned by Barry Pearce and beyond her the Gipping is alongside the Hythe…

I discovered that John is well and still living in Maldon in a house that overlooks the Hythe Quay.

The other gentlemen were Linda’s husband (a church warden of St Peter & St Paul, Shorne, a river side village to the east of Gravesend – and a place I have wanted to visit for a while too) and Robin Moffat, of West Mersea Marine … his connection is the enjoyment of a copy of ‘May Flower’ recently given to him as a present… Robin has asked me to make contact when next in West Mersea… I must do this!

Wow, what a small world we live in.

It is always amazing to me: I’m of the generation that wasn’t brought up with the marvels of our modern communications age.  Our ability to say, ‘let us go out for lunch’ … must be added to this too. Shorne to Lower Halstow by public transport would have taken half a day…

We can link with people on FaceBook (plus others) and such networks as Linkedin. We communicate by email more often than we ever wrote letters, or probably telephoned … then there is the blessed mobile phone, which has now encapsulated all means of electronic communications…

Graham Bell and Marconi would be amazed, surely, or maybe not!

The last ‘Brick’ Barge… I was in Kent to do a talk for the Queenborough Yacht Club … on my barging childhood and sailing life. It was silly not to pay a visit to old friends Geoff and Jane Gransden – we saw Ed too, which was nice, scraping and priming Edith May’s decks – and had a light lunch aboard their fine vessel.

Westmoreland in her dry dock as seen from Lower Halstow’s old brickworks dock last Saturday.

The spritsail barge Westmoreland recently moved to Edith May’s mooring buoy east of Lower Halstow Dock. She had been berthed for nearly two years round in Otterham Creek at an old cement works wharf.

‘A full campaign committee is now in place…’ Geoff Gransden told me when I was talking this last weekend. ‘We are not on the committee ourselves…’ he added, referring to himself and Jane. This is for a number of reasons, not least the time needed for their own barge Edith May.

It is expected that the barge will come into the dock towards the end of the year and be berthed aft of the Edith May when she will be back on her winter lay up blocks. A National Lottery application has been, or is being, prepared now that the cooperation of the Village’s Parish Council and parishioners has been given. The Parish actually held a referendum to ensure all had a say. You can search out the Parish web site for history of this and conversations.

What the team need is public support and, more importantly, perhaps some support from a brick manufacturer or two: it was barges like the Westmoreland that built up the brick empires, many of which were ultimately sucked into larger concerns of an international flavour too.

The Westmoreland leading the staysail class away on the Medway in 1961 – my sailing home is the barge to the fore to left hand side. Barge closest to camera was the Ardeer, then to right the Arrow. Picture: Ardley family collection.

Progress can be followed and support given, see: https://www.facebook.com/ThamesSailingBargeWestmoreland

I had a thoroughly enjoyable trip to London with the good mate on Sunday. We had been invited to the official opening of the annual exhibition of the Wapping Group of Artists… It was grand.

The exhibition at the Mall Galleries is open from 1000 to 1700 until Saturday 1st March (last day closes at 1600).

If you have the time and inclination it is well worth the effort. There are a range of fantastic scenes from the banks of the Thames ranging from around Windsor down to the sea. And, as many will know, the group’s works are spread around the estuary’s rivers and creeks too: all are within its bounds.

The Mate caught on camera, in conversation, as I tried to get a general view after being given permission by a Wapping Member: ‘…all publicity is good…’ he said, laughing with a twinkle in his eye. I could visualise the dapper and slight built gentleman, at ease, over his paints translating an evocative esturial scene onto his canvas or paper, with a light breeze stirring the inter-tidal grasses around his feet and cooling his neck…

Pictures by John Powley, which I much admired…

Pictures painted by Anthony Flemming … which we both liked. Me, especially, the one to bottom lhs … a scene I have placed looking across from around Stone Point on East Mersea towards Brightlingsea, called Sea and Sky. The detail is minimal, but the mind’s eye knows of the tower … the ghost of a spritsail barge … the smudge of a smack … the dash of white of a yacht or two against the faint low faintly painted grey/green shore. I admired it greatly…

There were so many good works by artists such as Roy Hammond, Sidney Cardew and Alan Runagall (who’s hero is Vic Ellis) to name just a few more. Most were well beyond my reach – but it is exhibitions such as this that allows a fleeting glimpse of the skills displayed by artists such as these. It was a pleasure and a privilege to be there…

Go along and give yourselves a treat, if you can!

During a walk this week round ‘the Wakerings’ in Essex, a secluded and out of the way place even though Southend looms close, I came across a wharf I’d been looking for. During the walk we found something else I found a little disturbing too. It is something the authorities must, surely, be aware of…

The wharf first. Up Mill Creek (name on modern maps) leading into the back of Gt Wakering are a collection of houseboats. They sit close by Sutton Boat Yard. The collection has grown over the last decade – some are not a pretty sight! One of the vessels has recently been moved a little, but enough to see that she’d been sat alongside the remnants of an old wharf. The wharf is shown on old maps of the late 1890s … when a brick works was operating to the north of Gt Wakering. The wharf has received some basic work – to raise a portion of it where a gang plank comes ashore… The creek has been truncated for well over 120 years too, even an 1805 map shows it to have been walled off!

The remains of the original wharf can be seen to the stern of this rusty houseboat…

Further into our walk when entering the area around Fleet Head Creek (a saltings infested place) which leads off Barling/Little Wakering Creeks there was a stretch of sea wall where the sea nearly topped it during the high tides of last December… The picture below shows this clearly … water must have been running over the top. Just a few centimetres more and the wall would have been breached! Sobering indeed for the people in that low lying area…

A little more and…

It seems a long while ago now when I was in the Cotswolds with the mate on a tour of west Wessex… It was about the time of the first of the long line of lows that have struck Britain this winter. I seem to remember it came ashore in Devon and Dorset… It was a few days before I had a symbolic paddle in the River Windrush, knowing that perhaps by the time I got out sailing next I’d be in those same waters…

Paddling in the Windrush, photographed by my horrified and bemused mate last October…

Since then we’ve had storm after storm, tidal surges down the east coast and along parts of the south coast, and rain and more rain… I doubt if I’d be paddling in that tranquil spot now.

The Somerset levels have flooded, again this winter too – now here I can’t quite understand why the river at times was down, but the land flooded, and huge pumps were to be seen trying to do the impossible … what of rivulets, drains and sluices. Has the land been allowed to dry out, fen land fashion, leaving the rivers perched above. Something needs to be sorted or the land let go, but protect the inhabited ‘islands’ … many coastal and salt water river areas used to be like that…

In the mean time, amongst many other things, recently we (Me, the mate and two friends) had a wonderful day in London (Greenwich actually) viewing the current Turner Exhibition, Turner & the Sea. It runs until 21st April 2014 at the National Maritime Museum. This was brilliant … absolutely brilliant. The exhibition is split into periods and types of his works with the useful addition of works by other artists, often alongside Turner’s works.

A reproduction of a part page from brochure is below. It relates to a section of the exhibition dealing with storm works. In many ways it is rather apt (even tomorrow there are 60-70 mph winds expected all around). Against this picture I made some notes: with seas as big as Turner depicted and a ship about to be completely destroyed, no one in the curators department seemed to notice that the sprit rigged vessel – going to the rescue? – hadn’t been reefed … and has been shown under full sail. I don’t think so. Turner must have thought about it: there are a row of reef points clearly painted onto the sail, hanging ready…

Anyway, what Turner was doing was depicting, with oodles of licence, a storm and weather…

Turner’s painting – Wreck of a Transport Ship – it normally sits in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon.

Of course, now, the news is filled with graphic pictures of the results of weather. Housing along the Thames flood plain corridor in the counties to the west of London have been inundated with water. It is a sad and thought provoking sight.

The Prime Minister has promised to throw money at the problem … I hope it doesn’t come back and bite him: much of it is not preventable unless housing can be lifted a metre or so, the land too. And if flood dams are built, where will the next floods go…? Surely, they will come again…

Boats along the ‘lost’ river banks seemed to be largely riding out the problems though… But, our thoughts have to be with all those people affected, up and down our fair land.