What was it like to cross the Thames Estuary a hundred years ago?

The Thames Estuary was different in many ways a century ago, but the charts they had look very well made to me

In many ways, navigation was far more complicated and anxious a hundred years ago, as a nice article by Roger Gaspar in the latest issue of the online magazine East Coast Sailor shows.

There have been a lot of changes over the past century or so. We all know what a blessing electronic navigation aids have been, not least in giving us an accurate position at the push of a button. Despite the general decay and decline in almost everything in life (I am middle-aged, after all), I can’t help thinking that by taking some of the worry out of it, modern navigation has made sailing a lot more fun and less tiring than  it used to be.

Roger Gaspar’s East Coast Sailor article compares the past and present and comes up with some surprises, including beacons that seem to have been placed for training purposes rather than navigation, and the news that the Black Deep, now the main channel for big shipping, hasn’t always been in such regular use.

And despite extensive reading of the old sailing writers, I hadn’t grasped how big a change it was when the old lightships were replaced by buoys, or how much the sandbanks and channels have moved and changed.

Speaking of writers from a century or so ago, I’ve been greatly enjoying Sir Herbert Alker Tripp’s book Shoalwater and Fairway (now available from Lodestar), in which he talks about the difficulties of navigation in his time, and describes a voyage in the opposite direction to Roger Gaspar’s.

By the way, did you know that as well as being a super writer and gifted illustrator and artist, Alker Tripp also had a distinguished career as an senior police official? Quite the polymath, Tripp – it’s difficult to imagine how he found time to work on all the activities in which he excelled.