When we were first married and living and working in Poole in 1963, we used to meet up at lunchtimes, park up on the Quay and have our sandwiches. We would watch the boats but we can honestly say that it never entered our heads that we might ever have one or even think about having one. Ann had to work for 10 weeks to earn enough money to buy a twin-tub washing machine and Michael’s £1000 a year covered the mortgage on our little bungalow and the £3.00 a week housekeeping.
By 1974 we were living in Bourne End and we bought an Enterprise sailing dinghy to use on the Thames. The first time we sailed it we capsized and Ann was highly miffed to be dumped in the river and from then on regarded anything with sails with great suspicion. So Michael recruited two friends to race with him in the Enterprise fleet of the Bourne End Yacht and Cruiser Club on Sunday mornings, namely John Allen and David Thompson. We later moved her up river to the Upper Thames Sailing Club when the BEYCC closed the Enterprise fleet.
In 1981 we bought the Lady Margaret, a 5 year old 27’ Tomahawk sailing boat with motor which slept four based in Poole. It felt really weird to have come full circle and to be back in Poole again. So at weekends we would drive with Helen and Steve from Bourne End to Poole to go out on the Lady Margaret. The major trouble was that her engine was carp (not a spelling mistake, an anagram). It had the most unfortunate habit of petering out at the wrong times. The silence when a boat engine has just petered out is deafening.
One memorable time was when with the engine going we let go of our mooring buoy and as soon as we had done so it petered out and Michael issued the command to grab the next mooring buoy as we passed it. This we did and waited while Michael head down in the engine tried to rectify the problem. Meanwhile, our friends Ann and Reg Swift came by in their boat. They were dressed in their oilies and looked as if they meant business. We asked where they were going and they answered Cherbourg, we smiled and wished them bon voyage as were in the middle of our own voyage to the next buoy and hopefully with any luck we would make it back to our own buoy before the day was out.
However we progressed and we would feel very pleased with ourselves when we went to Aunt Betty buoy and back. Aunt Betty is a big red buoy inside Poole Harbour.
Another problem with the Lady Margaret was that it had forward, reverse and neutral like all boats, but it was very difficult to tell which you were in. This caused us no end of trouble particularly when approaching pontoons. Michael would be at the helm and had us family as crew. Other boats would neatly and slowly come alongside and the crew would step off and tie up. That never happened to us. We would approach the pontoon like a rocket launcher and Michael would issue the command to catch something as we went shooting by. Inevitably this would end with a loud bang as we hit the pontoon and the boatyard owner would peer over the edge to see what damage we had done to his property.
Eventually we reached the Isle of Wight and we began to feel like true mariners. But we realised that if we were to go further we needed a bigger boat so in 1986 we bought a new 29’ sailing boat with engine Jeaneau Fantasia and named her Alouette (to the little loo). So named because of the greatly improved toilet facilities on board as Ann had frequently complained about the toilet arrangements on the Lady Margaret.
In Alouette we went to the West Country and twice to Cherbourg and it was during the uncomfortable return passage of the second trip that Ann was pinned in her seat for 9 hours watching every wave to work out which one was the one that would get us. She was sure one would and she wanted have a good look at it before it did. She began to mutter something about needing a bigger boat if we were going to do this kind of thing.
So in 1990 we bought a 2 year old 33’ Moody Eclipse called Sunshadow and we loved her. She had a bigger engine and instead of going along at walking speed as we had been doing she could go twice that and it was heady stuff. She had sails but smaller ones and that suited Ann down to the ground. In her we explored the Scillies and the Channel Islands and had some lovely holidays. In 1995 when we bought the cottage in Dittisham we moved her to her new mooring on the River Dart and she loved it there.
However as time went on we found we were rarely using the sails and as she did just 7 knots an hour at best perhaps it was time to have a motor boat which would go faster. And so in 2001 we bought a new 34’ Nimbus and named her Cloud Nine.
All this brings us neatly back to the opening page and the story so far.