Netherlands/Berlin Trip - Tollesbury      27th June:

    The day began with a flurry of activity. As soon as I arose, I changed all the bedding in my house and washed the used bedding. I also had a general tidy up. There was good reason for leaving the house in a clean and tidy state; my youngest daughter, Katie, and her family may be moving in for a short while. Her husband, Ross, had recently been promoted to sergeant in the army, and may be sent to a different posting. This would involve a "march out", a rigorous white glove inspection of their current army house. To help this operation run smoother, they would stay at my place while they transformed their house into a gleaming palace.
    My bags had been packed a couple of days earlier, the only thing left to do was to throw in my trainers, lock the front door and go. To my horror I found that a hole had appeared in the side of one of my trainers. I had been using them a lot for cycling recently, and the constant rubbing of a toe strap had caused the damage. A quick trip into town for replacements rectified the situation.
    Soon I was shooting down the A12, observing the outside temperature to be 26 degrees C. We were leaving the UK during a spell of high pressure. The weather was picking up, with a heatwave predicted for the following week.
    I found Rex and Meryl as chirpy as usual, and soon we were catching up on news over mugs of tea in the back garden. They had performed all the donkey work on Duonita, getting her shipshape. By late afternoon we had stowed away our luggage on board, and carried out a few maintenance tasks.
    Meryl had prepared a delicious roast dinner for us which would serve us in good stead for our North Sea crossing. Very kind of her I thought; perhaps she was mindful of the fact that a year earlier I had neither eaten nor drunk on our crossing of that treacherous stretch of water in "bouncy" conditions.
    Rex was itching to get away and by 20:00 we were aboard Duonita again, waiting for the tide to float us. However, it was neap tides, and at high water we were barely floating. Hmmm..... perhaps time for Rex and me to consider our dietary arrangements, or had he packed away too many jars of lime and chilli pickle? The air was filled with the sound of Oyster Catchers noisily gossiping over our predicament, probably taking bets on whether we would actually make it out on this tide. Not wishing to hang around for another 12 hours for an extra 20cm of water, we said our farewells to Meryl, and using a lot of engine brute force, we slowly eased and sucked Duonita out of the sticky, oozing mud, the surrounding waters taking on a rich, dark stain due to the churning sludge. Once free, we turned her nose towards the deeper channel, and we were off on another adventure. Those first few moments after leaving a berth for a brand new adventure into foreign lands always fill me with tremendous excitement and anticipation, a truly magical feeling that I always experience on such trips, and I guess I always will.

Heading Out Along the South Channel into a Blue Void on the Start of a New Adventure

    The Blackwater Estuary was almost flat calm, and apart from a solitary yacht heading into Tollesbury and a raft of yachts moored up for the night in the south channel, we had the whole estuary to ourselves. With the golden sun sinking below the horizon behind us, and Mersea, Brightlingsea and Clacton floating by on our port side, we headed out around the back of the Gunfleet Sands windfarm. This windfarm, with a curiously romantic name, is clearly visible from the coast.

Farewell Tollesbury

    The Gunfleet sandbank lies off the coastline of Tendring district in Essex, directly opposite (east) of the entrance to the former Gunfleet estuary (also known as Gunfleet Haven or Holland Haven). Between the sandbank and the coast was a protected channel and anchorage, but the dangers of the sands have long been known to mariners and large numbers of vessels and their crews have been shipwrecked there over the centuries. From at least the 17th century the sands have been marked by buoys and also by a beacon or lighthouse.

An 18th Century Coastal Chart for Use by Mariners, Probably Copied from Earlier Maps. It Shows the Gunfleet Sands and Estuary, and the Depths of Water (in Fathoms)

    The name "Gunfleet" was first recorded in 1318 when a vessel was shipwrecked on "Gunfletsond", that is to say the Gunfleet Sands. In the reign of Henry VIII (1509-1542) the "Gonflete" was also recorded as a sandbank, and a map of 1584 marks both the "Gonflet Haven" (the estuary) and "ye gonflit" (the sandbank). Thus the name of the estuary had clearly been appended to the sandbank that lay directly off the coast and opposite the estuary's inlet. The safer water between the sands and the inlet, now known as the Wallet, also seems to have been commonly known as the Gunfleet in the later 17th century when the English or Dutch fleets anchored there during the Dutch Wars. Similar uses of place-names including "fleet" for coastal channels can be found elsewhere, a good example being the Fleet in Dorset, a long narrow channel separated from the English Channel by the major sandbank known as Chesil Bank.
    As the former estuary was reclaimed for agriculture from the late 17th century onwards, so the original name was largely forgotten on land and replaced by the name Holland Haven. But off of the coastline the name has been preserved as the Gunfleet Sands into the 21st century.
    The romantic name of the Gunfleet Sands is also referred to in Rudyard Kipling's "The Long Trail".
    We now started to head up the Kings Channel. Once again I felt at home with the sea, and at the bewitching hour, turned in, leaving Rex to take the first watch.