Mudscape

As you sail east along the English Channel and turn left into the North Sea the water turns from blues and greens to blues and muddy colours, mixed with gray.

The colours are all beautiful but if I am really honest I am a blue sea person more so than  a mud one.

But the draw of the East Coast are the magnificient estuaries, with their staggering wildlife.  The closest one to me is the Medway Estuary in North Kent.

The mud can catch you out, as a happened on a PicoMicroYacht row recently. I was at the top of the Medway Estuary, where there is one public launching spot, the Commodore Hard.

Normally the hard is fine, as in the above picture on another occasion, although  it can be quite busy.

But I had gone out at half tide and returned at the bottom of the tide. There was a large sloping mudflat between me and the hard and I was stuck.  There would have been a long wait.

So I found a way to get PicoMicroYacht across the mud. It was no good getting out to push since I would have sunk deep into the mud.

My technique was to punt PicoMicoYacht, pushing over the stern with an oar.

When I tried to get the oar out of the mud at the end of each push, PicoMicroYacht would slip back again down the mudflat. So another technique was to hold the other oar vertically in the mud at the back of the boat and use it as a lever to keep the boat still whilst the other oar was extracted. This is reconstructed below, with me about to push the oar vertically into the mud.

It worked and PicoMicroYacht slid very slowly over about 60 metres of mud until it reached the hard and I was able to get out and fetch the trailer.

As you can see, to be an East Coast Sailor in the South of England you have to like the mud and also be prepared to wash it off.