Ad Lib 173

 

Stargazer seizes her opportunity: Twelve to fifteen knots of easterly breeze and a tide which turns shortly after dawn. Departing Ramsgate with the wind farm support boats.

We gybe off the Longnose beacon. Which marks the foundations upon which the cliffs of the North Foreland once stood. Before the sea drove them into retreat.

Into the London River (Thames) we sweep. Wind and tide unified, in their mission to bear us homeward in memorable style.

Merchantmen, in the Margate Roads anchorage, loom out of an autumnal mist. Which survives throughout the day. Despite the best endeavours of a polo-shirt-and-shorts sun. A reminder that October is almost upon us. The autumn equinox a week gone.

Surf breaks, on the Margate Hook sands, a boat length to starboard. But Stargazer sails on, untroubled, in deep water. As she lines up on the Copperas Channel. Her skipper straining to pick out the Reculver Towers daymark.

Stargazer skims across the watershed with a metre to spare beneath her keel. Deep water, by East Coast standards! Trusting to her waypoints. The physical marks revealing themselves, theatrically, at the last moment.

Lunch is taken on the wing. As Stargazer makes her stately way west, along the Four Fathoms Channel. Whitstable, the Swale and the Isle of Sheppey are lost to view, behind a gauzy grey veil, down to port.

We gybe into the Medway Channel as a dredger emerges. Hotly pursued by a pilot boat.

Happy Bunny speeds by, having left Ramsgate five hours after Stargazer. They have returned from St Peter Port (where we met in August) via the Normandy coast.

Inside Garrison point, duty tugs stand by below the Sheerness port control tower. 

Dwarfed by their leviathan charges.

With almost two hours of fair tide still to run, Stargazer ambles up the river Medway. Enjoying the transition from its industrial mouth, to the wild open horizons of the saltings.

Then, to the welcoming wooded banks of Upnor Reach.

At the head of which lies Basin No.1, of the former Chatham Naval Dockyard. Which Stargazer calls home.