The boats turned out, the sun shone, the tide rose (until it lapped over the top of the sound engineer’s feet – terrifying!) folks played in the water. There was a good crowd and there were more boats than last year. Well done the Kentish Sail Association.
The event was only marred by the sense of struggle people are having with the aims of local developers and planners I heard someone say there are folks who wish to replace one of the black sheds near the spot where these photos were taken with an eight-storey block of flats. The fight to save the Creek will have to go on and on – and yet in any reasonable world it should be regarded as so precious, it should not require this block-by-block protection.
All in all, the festival was probably exactly as you might expect. Or it was until a chap who sailed up the creek in a little standing-lug rigged flat-bottomed homebuilt dink with lapped ply sides.
‘What is it,’ I asked him.
‘It’s my own,’ he said. ‘I designed it and made it.’
‘Is it based on anything?’
‘No. It just came out of my mind. You should see what it happens when I put out the bowsprit and fly the spinnaker,’ he said.
‘How does it go?’ I asked. ’18 knots, easy,’ he said…
So it’s a flat-bottomed boat of 13-14 feet with a standing lug that sounds like it could outrun a Laser (or a Torch, now Bruce Kirby has renamed his famous design). In a country where few people even consider making their own boat let alone designing it for themselves, and an even tinier number would consider a standing lug, still fewer combining that an asymmetric spinnaker, I think that boat was today’s big surprise. And a challenge to home designers and builders everywhere…
