BOOKS Sea Peace by Lord Stanley

Lord Stanley purchased the Laurent Giles-designed 9-ton Argo for the 1936 sailing season. Initially he was uncertain about her yawl rig but this was solved early in his exploration of the East Coast when he was swept into a railway bridge when trying to enter the Broads and the mizzen ‘let go with a rending crash’. Stanley added new starboard main shrouds and ‘at a fraction of the cost’ Argo was converted to a cutter.

I planned this year to sail round England, by taking the east coast up the North Sea, thence through the Forth and Clyde Canal, and so back down the Irish Sea. This cruise should, I felt, round off my knowledge of harbours in the British Isles. A month before my holiday was due to start I had explored many anchorages in the Thames Estuary and the coasts of Suffolk and Norfolk, and found myself in King’s Lynn. Sailing in the Wash is a highly specialised art, for the tides run hard and uncertainly, the whole place is cluttered up with sandbanks and apart from the main channels, sea-marks are scarce; added to all this the surrounding coast is flat and featureless, so that unless one has good local knowledge one is apt to be in almost constant doubt as to one’s position.

But there are compensations. Although many people would deny that the country of the East Anglian seaboard is beautiful, I think it has a very special charm. The bird-life, the deserted, rather mournful combination of heathland and brackish, sluggish waterways, and the clear, bracing air have, for me at any rate, a great attraction. Still, four weekends of cruising in these waters was about enough, and I was glad to feel myself really at sea once more when we cleared the Wash bound for Grimsby.

This latter is no port for the yachtsman; the ebb tide in the Humber runs very hard, there is a great deal of traffic, and in a breeze of wind against the tide one can not only be uncomfortable but isolated from the shore as well. The only thing to do is go through the lock into the basin. Here one is chased every few hours by the Authorities who never seem to know the movements of shipping in the port and are therefore constantly calling on you to shift berth, generally at the most outlandish hours. Furthermore, Grimsby is one of the dirtiest harbours I know. It is impossible to keep the ship free of fine grit and coal dust which gets into everything, including locker drawers and corked bottles. The only place to beat it that I have found is Ismailia on the Suez Canal during the Khamaseen. And even Ismailia has the advantage that the sand is unadulterated with coal.

Nevertheless Grimsby is a rough, cheerful port, and perhaps it is typical of it that in joining Argo there, arriving from the station on a cold, wet night, I was stopped at the dockyard gate by a policeman, who opened the door and shone a torch round inside the taxi before allowing me to proceed. On my asking him what he was looking for, he looked at me in some surprise and tersely answered, ‘Girls.’ I told him that I classed girls with parsons when it came to taking them to sea, and agreed that nothing but bad luck and disaster could come from so ill-advised a proceeding, but that I had no idea that in Grimsby this superstition had been given official recognition and that the practice was forbidden. The explanation apparently is that the trawlermen, before leaving for the fishing grounds off Spitzbergen and Iceland, sometimes spend their last night ashore drinking to the success of the coming trip in the company of the local girls, and just before sailing on the morning tide, rather than break up such congenial society, the girl, who is either asleep or not altogether responsible, is brought aboard the trawler

Argo charged along as steady as a rock, heeling over in the gusts until her main rigging screws were under water

EDWARD JOHN STANLEY (1907-1971) 6th Baron Stanley served in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve during the Second World War. Sea Peace is prefaced by an elegy mourning the death of his close friend and sailing partner Roger Chetwode, who was killed in action in 1940.

and concealed, and sometimes does not realise the plight she is in until she is somewhere off the North Cape. She is then faced with three weeks on a fish diet. This practice is frowned upon by the Authorities, but I was assured by some trawlermen that in spite of the vigilance of the police some of the more determined fishermen still manage without great difficulty to circumvent the regulations.

We sailed at high water about midnight and were quickly swept down the Humber. It was blowing hard from the southwest, and off Spurn Point there was a wicked sea running, or rather I should say tumbling. For there was no run or regularity to the seas at all; they seemed to come at us from every possible direction in the darkness. Most of them seemed to come vertically up from nowhere, to tumble down on Argo’s decks under the disruptive force of their own weight. I think this incalculable behaviour must be due to the strong ebb flowing from the Humber meeting the main tidal stream flowing northwards up the coast. I have in my possession an old 18th-century chart of this piece of the coast in which the whole area off the mouth of the Humber is descriptively called ‘The Dreadfuls’, so it would seem my experience was nothing new.

It was not long before we ran out of this disturbed area and started a passage which I think was the best and most exhilarating I have ever made, for we covered the 112 miles to Blyth in 16 hours at an average speed of seven-and-ahalf knots, which is the theoretical maximum for a boat twenty-eight feet on the waterline.

The wind held in the southwest, blowing about Force

5 to 6, and since the coast is free from outlying dangers we could keep close in under the land in smooth water. Argo charged along as steady as a rock, heeling over in the gusts until her main rigging screws were underwater, which stopped her a little but I didn’t think this happened often enough to warrant reefing. Argo had a sailing clutch to enable her propeller to run free when under sail, and after a few hours of the annoying grinding of the shaft under my feet, I accepted a slight diminution in speed for the sake of peace and quiet and put the engine into gear.

To my surprise, after about 10 minutes the engine started. So fast were we sailing that dragging the propeller through the water was sufficient to turn it against the compression of the engine, and off she went…