Stargazer improvises her exit, before the impending month-long lock closure. Choosing the lesser of two evils. A light airs day; in preference to the thirty to forty knot blows otherwise on offer.
Darnet Fort slips slowly by. For we must fight the incoming tide, in order to have depth in the Copperas Channel. Now that neaps have passed unutilised, during a weekend of high winds and low temperatures.
Greylag and Oystercatchers serenade Stargazer from the steadily covering mud flats. As we hug the shallows to hasten our progress seaward.
A coaster rumbles by, in the main channel, making for the Chatham wharves.
Still close inshore, Stargazer turns east out of the Medway and into the Thames, at Garrison Point. Our speed rising as the foul tide slackens.
We pass the Reculver Towers, landmark for the Copperas Channel, with the tide fully turned beneath us. . . . .
. . . .and the North Foreland in sight. A creamy white wedge suspended between shades of silver and grey.
Stargazer reaps the reward, of her earlier tussle with the Medway Tide. The Thames ebb carrying her out to meet the Dover Strait’s south-going flow.
It sweeps us past the breakwaters of Ramsgate; the shingle shores and huddled houses of Deal. . . .
. . . . around the South Foreland. Beneath the soaring salt stained White Cliffs of Dover.
Dover VTS radios Stargazer: "Keep on coming. Make your best speed. Come in astern of the ferry now departing." Here to wait, at our leisure, for a suitable weather window in which to proceed south.
