Colne to the Stour on Wednesday

Today we began to defrost the freezer; as banal as this sounds, it had one major benefit: all of the meat had to be used up. Thus excused, we proceeded to eat delightful bacon and sausage baguettes – the baguettes fresh from the oven – which really helped after a 0600 start. Today’s leg took us from the River Colne to Harwich thence up the Stour. The sea was glassy, with a covering of mist, which was slow to burn off leaving us with poor visibility as we moved past Clacton-on-Sea.


The Port of Felixstowe is an impressive mark of human vandalism on the flat golden fields of East Anglia. A very busy channel led to the mammoth container ships before veering to port and up towards Harwich. Mooring on ha’penny pier was in our minds, but first we had to skulk on a mooring buoy across the water at Shotley (putting into practice the skills we learnt yesterday). Once the pier had been vacated by one boat, we were able to jostle and juggle the other boats (re-mooring one) in order to provide us with space. The weather was incredibly hot leading to an ice-cream hunt during our stop and a search for shade among the picturesque 18th Century houses and taverns of Harwich.

The wind bucked up later, permitting us to practice man-overboard drills with ‘Bob’ (a float and rope) and to sail up and down seeing the chock-a-block channel and Felixstowe traffic. Since then, we have sailed up river to our anchorage, eaten a vast pasta tuna-bake and are now satisfactorily bloated from pancakes whilst listening to the ‘localised heavy showers and thunderstorms’ and thinking of our friend John on the Maplefield, stuck off Harwich beach due to engine failure: but that is another story…