Gavin Atkin's weblog for the sort of people who like looking inside boat sheds. It's about old boats, traditional boats, boat building, restoration, the sea and the North Kent Coast
Nick Crane is right in this promotional film – Norfolk’s Broads are very special and it’s a great place to explore in a hire boat, whether it’s an engineless old-style sailing boat, a cruiser with an auxilliary engine or a motor boat.
The only thing I’d add to what he says is that when you tie up at night there is very often somewhere great to eat and enjoy a pint of hoppy local beer.
My daughter Ella asked to go again to the Norfolk Broads this summer, and I was delighted to be able take her there last week in a 1940s-built sailing cruiser named Twilight, hired from the Broads Yachting Company at Horning.
We had a great time. As local sailor Mark Harvey pointed out, we had some superb weather – at no point were we becalmed and didn’t suffer from too much wind either – and apart from the first night we plenty of sunshine and no rain.
With conditions like these, you won’t be surprised to know that we came back with two cameras full of snaps. This collection are from the first leg of our trip, as we sailed from the business of of Horning to the quaint remoteness of Horsey Mere.
This first first batch include some windmills – one complete with what looked to me like a large and interesting bird, though now I think it was a relatively commonplace cormorant – a brown-hulled Hunter’s Yard half-decker, a sister ship to Twilight (Twiglet, as one of the yard staff called her, was I’m sure the first of several of the Twilight class built to the same design), a strange house by the River Thurne, and the cut at Horsey.