Off to our sailing club at Hollowshore near Faversham today for a boat jumble. It turned out to be a good way to make use of the day, and sociable too, for the club is about as friendly as it’s possible to be.
The picture of my Julie loaded with the clobber we bought rather tells the story: two wooden canoe paddles, a safety harness, some oarlocks, a Tilley lamp and a nice pile of books for much less than they’d cost anywhere else. I think quite a few club members who had arrived intending to sell their clobber left with more stuff than they came with.
The smaller of the two sheds behind her is the clubhouse; the larger is a shed originally built for constructing Thames barges and still used for repairing traditional boats today. The burgee, by the way, commemorates a Viking ship found in the marshes on the opposite side of the creek.
The tide was quite high today, though I have seen even higher tides with the water lapping around the clubhouse’s footings, and I know some club members are looking forward to a very high spring tide a little later in March to launch their boats.
While all the big-money deals were done inside, outside the wind howled and the rain tumbled. I managed to snatch the remaining photos of Faversham Creek before we scuttled off to Faversham to gaze into the estate agents’ windows. I can’t tell you anything about the boats in the photos, except that they were near to the clubhouse and therefore easy to photograph quickly in the rain.
While at the club I picked up a copy of the Medway Yachting Association’s yearbook, which includes all the stuff you’d expect about tides, club contact numbers and so on. This year, however, I was very interested to find that it also gave a list of restoration and building projects just completed or taking place in the area around the River Medway. If your boat is one of them, I’d very much like to write about it in these pages. Please email me at gmatkin@gmail.com.
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