DICK DURHAM Setting a record

I’ve known sailors who have been desperate to leave a permanent wake for posterity over their passage-making and for most of them it is to find and complete a new maritime record. The knights Chichester, Knox-johnston, and Blyth, however, left few bones to pick over. They included encircling the globe longitudinally; making the fastest circumnavigation; or making the longest circumnavigation, all of which have since been claimed. So it gives me great pleasure to announce my own modest chalk-up; a record which, while not worthy of Drake’s sword upon my shoulder, is an achievement nevertheless.

It is in fact a record attained when my boat was completely abandoned by the tide, lying over on her port side on the greatest expanse of mud in Europe, of which the low water sandbanks of the Thames Estuary are part. I did not set out to alert an admiring public to my prowess.

In fact I only discovered I had once it dawned on me that my efforts did not go entirely unnoticed.

‘Well done you,’ said Clive Brumage – ‘Brum’ to all of us who rely on his skills, as unofficial bosun, at the Belton Way Small Craft Club, a shed on the fag-end of the Leigh-on-sea marshlands, which is arguably the smallest yacht club in Britain with just 55 members.

Five of them were sitting in the cockle-shell littered clubhouse when I fell through the door in a state of exhaustion, giving me a rousing round of applause.

It all began with the desire never to have to drive to my boat again. From my bedroom window I look out over the Thames Estuary which, tide in, is all a-glitter, and tide out is glutinous mud covering the boulder clay of the London basin. It is a perfect plain for a swinging mooring and by means of an abandoned fisherman’s

anchor, with one fluke cut off, I buried the root of my new mooring in 4ft of clay, cockle and mussel shell.

All good, except later in the season I noticed my new mooring was on top of another which had just been re-laid for the summer. So, armed with a shovel and a fish box to sit on I trekked back out across the mud and started to disinter the mooring root.

Digging in estuary mud is very hard work. Because the mud is so sticky, each shovel takes at least four actions: one digging into the mud and extricating a heavy sod and three removing it from the blade by bashing it on the excavated pile until it slithers off. If that wasn’t bad enough I was digging blind as the pit soon filled with water: I had to start as soon as the tide had run off the flats in order to have enough time to extricate and re-bury the old anchor. This meant I was digging before the ebbing tide’s water table had dropped low enough to give a dry pit. So, allowing for the water to drop, I started the fresh hole, digging down until it, too, filled with brine.

Moving back and forth from hole to hole I eventually exposed the anchor stock and then, on my hands and knees, broke the suction around the buried fluke, tied a rolling hitch around it and hauled it back on itself, capsizing it. I then dragged it to the new hole and commenced to re-bury it. The final filling in of the new hole saw me, a mud-covered estuary Yeti stumble ashore, so exhausted I had to drag the spade behind me.

After the aforementioned applause died down I discovered it is apparently unheard of to dig two burial pits in the space of one low water. I do not have a plaque to commemorate my feat, but, better than that, I can now see my boat from my bedroom window and the car remains on the driveway when I go sailing.

I can now see my boat from my bedroom window