Photo: Maureen Parsons
On the Wednesday of Mersea Week the Yacht Club organizes a unique fun race that appeals to all types of dinghy sailors. The course is quite simply to circumnavigate theIsland(about 13 miles). However, you have to specify your start time on your entry form about a week in advance. It is necessary to arrive at the Strood (Essexspeak for causeway) on the north side of the island at high tide when the traffic is stopped and you can quickly carry or wheel your boat across. This year only four GP14s out of a total fleet of 130 entered – three fromTollesburySCand one fromHaveringSC.
On the day the WMYC’s organization is always impressive, with starting signals at 5-minute intervals (over several hours) and groups of boats setting out in both directions from a committee boat line off the yacht club. My plan this year was to start two hours before high water; consequently we had to round the island anticlockwise and knew we would initially face an adverse tide.
Once clear of the moorings, we hoisted the spinnaker and took off down wind, the Force 5 Souwesterly against the tide creating quite big waves. We soon began to pass capsized boats (well attended by RIBS) and as we were now running dead downwind in very lumpy conditions and feeling quite insecure we lowered the spinnaker before gybing inshore. RoundingEast Mersea’s Stone Point we entered the Pyefleet, an important anchorage for sailing barges, smacks and bawleys based at Brightlingsea. We now had the tide underneath us and the water was much flatter as we sailed past the Pioneer, the lastEssexskillinger ( an 70-foot ketch-rigged deep sea smack) recently rebuilt and sailed without an engine by volunteer crews with school parties aboard.
Continuing up the Pyefleet we were working hard upwind. The crew Roger pointed wistfully at the Colchester Oyster fishery, but we pressed on and as we approached the Strood began to meet a few boats rounding to starboard. Our helper on the road had our spare trolley ready, but we were early and it was some minutes before the police held up the traffic for us. The 2 mile beat on the western side was much more exposed, but all went well until the tiller extension fell off and we narrowly missed several moored boats.
We finished after 1hour 58 minutes, but then found the Dabchicks S C slipway still completely flooded. After mooring the boat, Roger disappeared to the Company Shed to slurp oysters, leaving me to search under several feet of water for our trolley.
There were only 92 finishers this year; the winner – a Mirror – took only 19 minutes more than us. Second place went to a Tornado (71 minutes!) which was the only boat going the opposite way round to us that did well. The GPs finished 6th, 15th, 28th and 58th. The day ended with generous prizes and a spread of seafood, all provided by Ellisons, the main sponsor of the event.
