A chilly introduction…

We’d been beaten up by the Beast from the Baltic. Walking home from the Frinton clifftop, where I’d squinted through the blizzard thinking: “What a great day for a sail,” I was reminded of Maurice Griffiths’ maiden voyage aboard his first boat – a  converted 17ft ship’s lifeboat – as described in his Magic of the Swatchways.
 
For a chap who was to become editor of Yachting Monthly, designer of 140 different yachts, author and war hero, he chose a rum time for the trip from Woodbridge to Ipswich…a January snow storm. Let’s join him off Felixstowe. He’s already run aground on the Deben bar, escaping by the skin of his teeth thanks to his crew getting out and pushing…
 
“…That was the coldest and most miserable passage I have ever made. We were able to stand only short spells at the helm, and I well remember the agony of aching hands as one sat in the bucking cabin, trying to get back one’s circulation in the brief spell below, while increasing bilge water surged up on the lee berth.
 
By the time we had brought Landguard Point at the entrance of Harwich Harbour in sight through a break in a sleet squall, the ebb tide had eased, and another board allowed us to fetch  through the shallow swatchway  that used to lie in those days between the end of the jetty and the deadly Platter Sands.
 
Here an unexpected cross sea suddenly rose above us to windward, tumbled over and fell with a thunderous crash on our deck, seething over the cabin-top and surging into the well. For one sickening moment, as the water boiled around our feet and burst open the cabin doors, it seemed that the little boat had filled and was going down under us;  but she slowly shook herself free of the water, lurched on and rounded the point into the harbour, very much down by the head with the weight of water inside her.
 
While we raced up the smooth water of the harbour I bailed with a bucket until the bilge water was below the floorboards once more; then I lit the Primus and handed out a mug of steaming Bovril to the mate, who had so unselfishly risked his life for the sake of my boat.
 
An hour later, when we lay snugly on my moorings at Ipswich, with the gear stowed and a hot meal under way, we sat in the cramped little cabin, drying ourselves, and declared that, now it was over, it had been a great passage and the boat herself a ‘wonderful sea boat’ to have stood it. And the joy of ownership that I felt then, the mounting enthusiasm that swept over me like a flood, glossed over all its trials and hardships, its dangers and miseries, and wanted to do it all again, to go and explore other rivers and estuaries in her – for she was mine. My boat!
 
The joy of that moment lingers still…”
 
A heart warming end to a numbing tale.

In later, and warmer, times. The Eventide, one of Maurice Griffiths' classic designs